Photo by Jessica Stewart / St. Joseph News-Press

Dr. Deborah Weems gives a talk about nonverbal communication to the Buchanan County Medical Society. Ms. Weems is an emergency room doctor and a student at Missouri Western State University.

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Dr. Deborah Weems’ passion coming out of medical school drove her to emergency room jobs around the state. About 15 years later, that commitment to medicine is still there, but another, older passion has sprung up.

“When I was a kid,” said the highly nontraditional Missouri Western State University video student, “I would spend Sundays watching Wild Kingdom. I loved wildlife documentaries.”

Still working 12-hour shifts in a Kansas City emergency room, Dr. Weems enrolled at Western in the department of communications studies and theater. She’s two semesters away from her degree, which has a heavy emphasis on video production.

Dr. Weems, also a St. Joseph Public Library board member, never really let the dust settle on her still film cameras as she pursued science. Her work is displayed downtown at Pony Espresso. She switches out her pictures — close-up shots of bees on flowers, eagles flying past a glacier in Alaska, cardinals playing in the snow, for example — about once a month if they haven’t sold.

“If you could do education again,” Dr. Weems said of an informal poll she took of her fellow doctors, “what would you do differently? The almost universal response is, ‘I would have taken more literature, art, history ... more liberal arts.’”

So, she became a “vidiot,” a term of endearment a friend uses to mock her enthusiasm for video production.

“I reached a point where it was time to go back to the artistic stuff I had abandoned to pursue the science and the medicine,” she said.

About a year ago, she wrote a paper for a film class. The paper relied heavily on her career as a doctor. Around the same time, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced a revision in how cigarette smoking would weigh in rating movies (G, PG, PG-13, R or NC-17).

That paper could become a book.

“Smoking, Ratings and Censorship in the Movie Industry,” which Dr. Weems describes as “provocative,” establishes nicotine as highly addictive and says that the adolescent brain, though capable of regurgitating all the statistics about the risks involved with smoking, can’t make appropriate judgment calls.

“Seeing popular actors smoke in movies does influence teen behavior to start smoking,” Dr. Weems said in her paper.

The paper also proposes, citing sources, that tobacco companies have for years targeted Hollywood movies as vehicles to promote their product and that children are twice as likely to pick up smoking by watching it on the silver screen as they are by living with two smoking parents.

Dr. Weems said that giving an “R” rating to a movie does little to dissuade teens from seeing it because the MPAA doesn’t police theaters. But, giving a film an NC-17 rating would be a form of economic censorship because of the studio’s ability to market a film with that rating to retailers, an issue she plans to expand on in her book.

She delivered the six-page paper in San Francisco at the Pop Culture Association National Conference in March, where she was approached by Continuum Books for a possible publishing deal. She’s working on the proposal for the book this summer.

Meanwhile, Dr. Weems intends to be a familiar face at wildlife film festivals where she’s already made the rounds. Not only is she a photographer/film student/doctor, she’s getting fellowship in expedition medicine and has the spunk to be a valuable asset to any documentary team. She’s handing out business cards to everyone from National Geographic to the BBC.

“I’m circling at the periphery,” she said. “Someone will say, ‘Gee, remember that crazy woman who is a doctor? Let’s call her.’”

Dr. Weems will get her start this summer as she shoots and edits a documentary for Community Action Partnership’s Head Start program.

“You have to always put yourself into something new,” she said, alluding to another unknown career after documentaries. “Once you stop doing that, you’re dead.”

Jimmy Myers can be reached at jimmymyers@npgco.com.