I was finally getting around to watching some of the Academy Award nominated movies that I’d taped during TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar (in February of this year) the other day when I happened upon None Shall Escape (1944), which had earned Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than a Best Original Story nomination. It’s a World War II drama that accurately predicted the Nuremberg trials and (of course) also predated Stanley Kramer’s star-studded blockbuster – Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) – about the actual events. I’m always fascinated to discover movies whose stories are prescient, some eerily so, and one of my favorites is airing on the channel later this month.

Though it was thought to be too cynical to attract much of an audience in its day, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951) does an excellent job of capturing the kind of media circus that is now commonplace at the site of tragic events. While a curiously morbid public has always been drawn to train wrecks (of any kind), moviegoers at the time of this drama’s release were too naive to believe that a reporter could be so unscrupulous as to manipulate the rescue of a dying man for his paper’s circulation, ratings, and perhaps an even bigger reward. Kirk Douglas plays the sensationalist newspaperman who exploits the mine trapped Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) in hopes of winning a Pulitzer Prize! His web of ambition ensnares others including Minosa’s own disgruntled wife (Jan Sterling), a cub photographer (Robert Arthur), and the local sheriff (Ray Teal) up for reelection. If you’ve yet to see it, don’t miss it this June 12th at 4:15 PM ET; Wilder, Lesser Samuels, and Walter Newman earned a Best Writing Oscar nomination for their Story and Screenplay that was based on an actual event.

In the romantic comedy It Should Happen to You (1954), director George Cukor & writer Garson Kanin predict today’s “cult of celebrity” in which everyone is striving to find and claim their “15 minutes of fame”; it also touches on the costs associated with achieving it. The movie works primarily because of the unique talents of its star Judy Holliday and the “quirky, innocent, naive, seemingly dizzy yet fairly smart and proud” character qualities that she brought to her too few film roles. That same year, director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg won Oscars for On the Waterfront (1954). Three years later, they collaborated on their only other project titled A Face in the Crowd (1957), a stunningly prescient look at the power of television and celebrities in the political process. Andy Griffith gives a performance that has to be seen to be believed as the Arkansas Traveler, an Arthur Godfrey-like character who wields undue influence over fans of his homespun shtick, radio and TV programs.

While the Manchurian Candidate (1962), released approximately 13 months before President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, bears some resemblance to those subsequent historical events, “life imitated art” much more succinctly after the release of Marooned (1969). John Sturges’s sci-fi drama portrays the United States at a time when space travel had become blase and a group of three astronauts (played by Richard Crenna, James Franciscus, and Gene Hackman) get stranded in space such that the space agency must figure out how to get them home before their oxygen runs out. The film was released in Los Angeles on December 11th, 1969 and it received the Special Effects Academy Award on April 9, 1970 … Apollo 13 launched April 11, 1970 (and you know the rest of the story)!

Since I’ve already written about writer Paddy Chayefsky’s prescience for Sidney Lumet’s drama Network (1976), which further defined the forthcoming celebrity culture and ratings-based news programming as well as predicting faux experts and “reality” TV (and earned Chayefsky his third Academy Award), now it’s your turn:

What other classic “ahead of their time” movies can YOU think of which predicted the future?