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…
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