In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese in May 2016.

TCM SPOTLIGHT: AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES (Thursdays in May, 8pm)--This month, TCM is paying tribute to Roger Corman (who turned 90 in April) by way of a larger tribute to American International Pictures, in which he played a key role. AIP was founded in 1954 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, and Roger came aboard early on as a producer and director (along with Alex Gordon). The company identified a then new audience for movies: young people. It seems odd now, when absolutely everything is pegged to "youth," but back in the '50s the idea was novel, and AIP stepped in with horror, science fiction, drag race pictures and hip comedies--all of them made very quickly and cheaply, and they bypassed conventional exhibition by opening the pictures at drive-ins, where they went straight to their target audience. The company built an impressive roster of talented artists, young and old, and they provided a training ground for many young directors, myself included. TCM is showing 24 AIP pictures throughout the month, many of them directed by Roger, whose Edgar Allen Poe "cycle" was the crown jewel of the library. They're also showing the American release version of Mario Bava's three-part Black Sabbath, as well as "The Wurdulak," which is the middle episode in the original version and comes last in the American cut, is truly terrifying, Brian De Palma's Sisters and Vincente Minnelli's last film, A Matter of Time.

CINEMA'S EXILES: FROM HITLER TO HOLLYWOOD (May 2, 3 and 4, 8pm)--At the beginning of the month, there's an interesting tribute to Hollywood's exile community of the '30s and '40s. The series is built around a showing of Karen Thomas' 2009 documentary Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood. We've talked a lot in this column about the directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, composers and production designers who escaped from Europe between the '20s and the '40s. Where would American cinema be without them? Let's begin with Billy Wilder. Wilder, who was born in Austria, was just beginning as a filmmaker in Berlin when the Nazis took power. Like Fritz Lang, he arrived in Hollywood by way of Paris. His former partners (on the 1929 People On Sunday), Robert Siodmak and Fred Zinnemann, also born into Jewish families, took the same route. So, consider Ninotchka, a comedy about exile, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, who had left Germany for Hollywood in the '20s, co-written by Wilder, with a cast of European transplants, many of whom (Felix Bressart, Bela Lugosi, Alexander Granach) were forced to flee their home countries. The score was composed by another exile, Werner Heymann, who had, like many of the actors, worked with the great Austrian theatre artist Max Reinhardt, also in exile. Casablanca, which takes place on the refugee trail, is filled to the brim with actors forced to leave Europe, from Peter Lorre and Paul Henried and Conrad Veidt to character actors and bit players like S.Z. Sakall, Leonid Kinskey, Marcel Dalio, Helmut Dantine and Curt Bois. It's astonishing to study the credits for the films in this series and see so many names of artists driven out of their homelands, so many composers (Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklós Rósza, Franz Waxman), DPs (Rudolph Maté, Karl Freund), and grand old men of the stage and the screen like Albert Bassermann, who had to learn his English lines phonetically. This series is a tribute to their bravery and their artistry.