What was the first-ever studio to make a movie?
In the realm of cinema, the movie studio system has been a cornerstone, shaping not only how movies are produced but also how they are distributed and exhibited. This assembly-line approach to filmmaking, epitomised by Hollywood giants like Warner Bros, Universal, and MGM, is so ingrained in the industry that it’s hard to imagine a time before its existence.
Indeed, cinema as we know it truly is defined by the concept of a studio. Whether sitting in a darkened theatre or watching a movie at home, the grandiose idents announcing which company has brought whichever story to the silver screen are as memorable as the stories themselves. The roaring lion has become synonymous with James Bond, and the blaring horns of 20th Century Fox are as ingrained in our collective consciousness as Homer Simpson, Wolverine, Butchy Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
However, like any great story, the tale of the movie studio system has its origin, its pioneering first chapter. That chapter began in a curious little structure known as the Black Maria, the world’s first-ever movie studio. Built in 1893 by the iconic inventor Thomas Edison and his assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, the Black Maria was located in West Orange, New Jersey.
To contemporary eyes, its architecture might seem peculiar, a windowless, black-painted wooden shack — but within its walls, the future of cinema was being shaped. Designed with a retractable roof and a revolving platform to follow the sun’s movement, the Black Maria ingeniously harnessed natural light for its recordings. These features, rudimentary and antiquated as they may seem today, were utterly groundbreaking for their time.
The movies produced at the Black Maria were simple but revolutionary. Among its earliest works was Fred Ott’s Sneeze, a mere five-second clip capturing a man sneezing – and yet, it was a marvel in an era when moving pictures were a totally fresh concept. The studio went on to produce an array of other short films, from vaudeville acts to slices of everyday life like 1896’s Fun in a Chinese Laundry. These short works, distributed through Edison’s Kinetoscope parlours, introduced the public to the notion of movies as we know them.
Though it was dismantled in 1901, the legacy of the Black Maria is foundational. Within its wooden confines, the concept of a “director” emerged, as did rudimentary methods for capturing and editing motion that have evolved into techniques used to give us staggering achievements like 70mm photography, 3D motion film and the IMAX camera, and laid down the basic framework for the complex studio systems that would follow.
The Black Maria may have been small and unassuming, but its impact on the cinematic world was anything but. Forever immortalised as a National Historic Landmark, this tiny creative endeavour should always be remembered as the little studio that could, and did, change the world.
