Tara McNamara’s career path as an entertainment journalist, reviewer and movie historian started with watching Turner Classic Movies with her son in the early 2000’s.
Cole McNamara was around 8 years old at the time when Tara McNamara felt there was not a lot of television children and parents could watch together. And, that’s where TCM came in. Many of the films on TCM were filmed post 1934, the years following the implementation of a production code, a precursor to the current film rating system that rates movies from G for all audiences to NC-17 for adults only.
“My son was already predisposed to ‘Godzilla,’ so black and white wasn’t a hurdle he had to overcome,” McNamara said. “The reason we started watching these films together, we could just turn it on. I realized later, it was because of the Hays Code. Because they were making sure that all movies were for general audiences.”
Now, 20 years later, McNamara, a Hermosa Beach resident, will be making her TCM debut in July co-hosting the limited series “The Hays Gaze” with veteran TCM host Dave Karger.
“This is a realization of a 20-year dream,” McNamara said of co-hosting the series.
The show will air each Monday night in July and look at what McNamara calls “tawdry topics” and how they were depicted before the Motion Picture Production Code began in the early 1930s, and the decades following.
A number of scandals rocked Hollywood in the 1920s, including the rape/murder trial of silent film comedy superstar Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, the unsolved shooting murder of director William Desmond Taylor, and the morphine addiction and death of star actor Wallace Reid.
To counteract the image that Hollywood was during into another Sodom and Gomorrah, the Motion Picture Production Code was created a decade later.
The production code, also known as the Hays Code after Will Hayes, a former Postmaster General and the first Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America chairman, was the first attempt to censor films in the U.S. It was enforced from around 1934 to the 1960s. The Hays Code dictated restrictions portraying nudity, scenes of childbirth, profanity or drug trafficking in televised shows and films.
Pre-code movies are those known to be released before 1934, when filmmakers had more freedom to explore topics such as prostitution or infidelity.
The first night of “The Hays Gaze,” on Monday, July 1, looks at how prostitution and other topics were portrayed, beginning with the film “Waterloo Bridge” from 1931, starring Mae Clarke and Kent Douglass, and the 1940 remake featuring Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor.
“I think women are often targets, and sexuality is often the targets of the Hays Code, so we started off with prostitution,” McNamara said.
Other topics covered by McNamara and Karger over the five weeks of programming will be religion, sex and violence, alcoholism and gangster molls (female companions of criminals).
McNamara started her film journalism career in 2004 with the website KidsPickFlicks, which she created with the help of her children where youth could showcase their film reviewing talents.
McNamara has worked at Fandango, Variety, Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition, CNN, Reelz Channel and reviews films with a parent’s perspective for Common Sense Media, as well as other outlets.
Around five years ago she started a 1980s pop culture podcast with her daughter Riley Roberts called “80s Movies: A Guide to What’s Wrong with Your Parents” while creating the website 80sMovieGuide.com.
McNamara has hosted screenings at the annual TCM Classic Film Festival, which celebrated its 15th year in Hollywood in 2024.
Around 2019, McNamara pitched Charlie Tabesh, senior vice president of programming and content strategy at Turner Classic Movies, the idea looking at the impact on the Hays Code, while at the festival.
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“I have my career essentially because of the Hays Code and everything I do now and advising parents on what the content is in film,” McNamara said.
TCM, McNamara said, is for film lovers, so that makes it a particular challenge to host on the channel, which was launched in 1994 with actor-turned-film historian and author Robert Osborne at the helm. He was the star host on TCM until his death in 2017.
“TCM fans are amazing,” McNamara said. “They are so knowledgeable. It’s really fun for me when I’m researching a movie. Okay, I’m not taking any of the low hanging fruit? They are already going to know that, so I need to go deep and find out some info that they’ve never heard before and find a new angle.”
For more information and film schedule, visit tcm.com.