Chemistry Major Tom Weaver ’98 Makes a Creative
Shift
By Jillian Cohan
Most days, as afternoon fades to evening, Tom Weaver ’98 finishes
the scene he’s
writing and leaves his Naugatuck, Conn., bachelor’s pad. He drives down Route 63,
past the Wal-Mart, to Sigma-Aldrich chemical company, where he dons a lab coat and picks
up the work a chemist started on the day shift.
Today he makes an exception. Meeting for
an interview here, at a café full of Hartford-area
professionals and students from the law school around the corner, is a concession to
logistics. He would be more comfortable in a coffee shop like the one his parents run
in Shamokin, deep in Pennsylvania coal country.
Dressed in dark jeans and a wool sweater,
Weaver could be mistaken for a grad student. Engaging him in conversation only adds
to the image of a young intellectual.
He reads Cervantes and Dostoyevsky for fun, he
says, and is writing a Kafkaesque screenplay. It’s clear he knows what “Kafkaesque” means.
“Some
people want the best car or the best movie [collection]. I read writers like that because
I think they’re the best out there,” he says.
Most of his friends from Shamokin
wouldn’t believe he writes screenplays or works
in a chemistry lab.
“I sound like a gigantic nerd,” he says, as if he
doesn’t believe it himself.
Early on, he was a precocious kid who struck up
conversations with everyone he met at his parents’ diner. He skipped first
grade and joined the gifted-and-talented program at his Ukrainian parochial school.
But in eighth grade baseball took precedence over books.
“Growing up blue collar
you don’t hang out with the brainy kids. It’s a lot of big,
bruising guys,” he says.
His smarts were enough to make Weaver the first person on either
side of his family to earn a college degree, but when he got to Dickinson he found himself
overshadowed by a superstar group of chemistry majors.
“I wondered about Tom,” says
Phil Joyce ’98, his lab partner and post-college roommate.
“He’s from
this middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania town—it’s very blue collar—and
I wondered, ‘What’s this guy doing here?’ People assumed that because he
didn’t
fit the chemistry stereotypes, he wouldn’t be good at lab [work]… but he had
an aptitude for working with his hands that translated into lab work.”
After college,
Joyce helped his friend line up a job at Sigma-Aldrich, and the two shared an apartment
for a year. He knew Weaver read War and Peace on his dinner break at the lab, but he
thought his buddy’s
interest in writing had died after Weaver took a creative-writing class their senior year.
When Weaver called this winter to tell him that he’d sold a script for the comedy
Stuart Gimble to an independent-film producer, the news took Joyce by surprise.
Chemistry
professor David Crouch wasn’t entirely surprised to hear of Weaver’s shift
into creative mode. As he remembers, “He told the best one-liners in lab.”
Screenwriting
started as a hobby a few years ago. Since he didn’t watch TV, Weaver had plenty
of time to write, and the ideas flowed faster than he could type. A childhood friend
who worked in Hollywood encouraged him, and he pressed on.
An independent-film Web site
led Weaver to producer Brandon Kane, who runs Cosmic Control Productions, a small company
in Rhode Island. Kane gave him bit parts in Cosmic Control films—the first was
a “sci-fi schlock film, so you didn’t really have to act”—and
introduced him to other independent filmmakers in New England.
Weaver parlayed these
connections into a few more acting roles, and is working with an illustrator to write
the story for a comic book. His scriptwriting ambitions got a boost this winter, when
he teamed up with seasoned TV writer Ted Lee, who has written scripts for the Sci Fi
Channel.
This winter the two co-wrote a pilot episode called “The Strange
World of Elmer Gunn.” Weaver
describes the script as sort of Dr. Who meets The X-Files, with a lighter tone. They’ll
shop it around this spring, hoping to sell it to a mainstream network. If they succeed,
Weaver will hang up his lab coat and pack for Hollywood.
If he sells a screenplay, maybe
he’ll pay for his parents to take a vacation, which they haven’t
done in years.
“Or maybe I’ll get enough money to send my nephew to Dickinson.”
He
glances around the coffee shop, and smiles.
“If none of this was any fun, I wouldn’t
touch it. It’s better to be a well-fed chemist
than a starving artist.”
