Tom Hartley is an award winning writer best known for the stage play Shades, and the writer and director of the viral web video Gayze.
Tom’s writing career goes back many years and started with screenplay writing. In 2013 Tom decided to take his gay-themed coming of age drama screenplay and adapt it for the stage. The stage version added much more comedy elements, and it was officially dubbed a dramedy. Shades was the contest winner for the city of West Hollywood sponsored Emerging Playwright Workshop & Competition at Macha Theatre in April 2013. The play was performed as a staged reading at the Macha Theatre, a 99 seat theater in West Hollywood, CA and received the highest score from a panel of Los Angeles area playwrights and industry professionals.
Shades had a successful month long run to enthusiastic audiences in March & April 2014 at the Macha Theatre (now 11:11) and was directed by award winning director Odalys Nanin.
Tom Hartley Entertainment was formed in 2014 and serves as the company for distribution of additional writing by Hartley, including new screen and stageplay work, as well as the February 2015 release of the popular short film Gayze as featured in the Huffington Post.
On August 23rd, 2016 they released Useless Mutants, a short film about a group of wannabe X-men starring Lori Allen Thomas, Brock Thompson, Kymberly Stewart, Troy Kristoffer, and Mark Labella. On September 20, 2016, Spy My Friends took the Internet by storm sparking controversy over an invasive spying app with attributes more like Edward Snowden’s reported government surveillance. Spy My Friends stars Nicholas Berson, Catherine Mersereau, Mark Labella, and Andy Kenareki.
In 2019, Hartley is currently working on a sitcom script with writing colleague Tobias Haze. The new project, Alterverse, is a workplace and relationship serialized comedy. Alterverse is about two workplace rivals that are shifted into an alternate universe and must figure out how to fit in and how the hell to get home. The show is a woman-led 30-minute single camera pilot.