Edison’s Black Maria—First Film Studio Building

Edison's tar paper shack the Black Maria was the first structure built as a film production studio shown with it's hinged roof open to provide light for shooting.

On February 1, 1893 Thomas Edison completed construction of what was the world’s first film production studio building to accommodate making product for his new money-making project—ultimately the public exhibition of films employing his recently patented Kinetoscope.  The building, literally a tar paper shack on the grounds of Edison’s laboratories at West Orange, New Jersey, was nearly as innovative as the camera and exhibition equipment it was meant to accommodate. 

Maybe more so since Edison had no more than broadly conceived the devices and left development to his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson who had returned from the  Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 and incorporated advanced features of systems developed in France by  Étienne-Jules Marey and Charles-Émile Reynaud.  In his patent applications and the intense publicity campaigns that followed, Edison, true to form, took sole credit.

The building—more of a shed, actually—was slapped together on a wood frame, its exterior walls and ceiling covered in black tar paper.  A slanting roof over the filming chamber was hinged and could be raised to admit sunlight, necessary because none of Edison’s electric lights were bright enough to accommodate indoor filming.  The whole thing was built on a turn table so that the open roof could catch the light of the sun all day as it moved across the sky.

Construction had begun in mid-December of 1892 and did not take long taking into account interruptions for normal New Jersey winter.  Edison’s meticulous records show that it cost a grand total of $637.67 to build.  That’s about $15,275 in current dollars or roughly the cost of a home garage. 

A Harper's  Weekly illustration shows filming in the studio.  The Kinetograph camera is in the box.  An Edison cylinder Gramaphone provides music for the performers.

It was an uncomfortable place to work.  Cold and drafty—virtually unheatable when the roof was raised—in the winter and a stuffy, sweltering hot box in the steamy summers.  Officially Edison named the building the Kinetographic Theater although no films were ever exhibited there.  Informally he called it the Doghouse.  The underpaid employees who worked in it uncomfortably in had an even less flattering name—the Black Maria, after a common nickname for a police patrol or Paddy wagon.

Production began almost immediately on short—a few seconds to just over a minute long—films intended not yet for commercial exhibition but for publicity purposes to whet the public’s appetite.  Edison had no thought of trying to tell stories. For him the thrill would be in simply the novelty of seeing photographic images move.

Edison had already demonstrated short films he had shot outdoors.  In May he demonstrated film produced in the Black Maria for the first time at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.  The public could view—one at a time—a clip of three men pretending to be blacksmiths—by peering into the eye piece of a Kinetoscope machine.

Dickson was placed in charge of production at the studio.  In August of 1893 he sent the first film to the Library of Congress for copyright protection—a few second of Edison employee Fred Ott sneezing.  This was also a promotional film and stills from it were published in Harper’s Weekly accompanied by a suitably breathless article on Edison’s latest triumph.

When the Holland Brothers agreed to exhibit Edison’s product at their Kinetoscope Parlor at 1155 Broadway in New York City, production ramped up of clips for commercial exhibition.  Among the earliest efforts which we loaded into two rows of five Kinetoscopes included titles such as Barber Shop, Blacksmiths, Cock Fight, Wrestling, and Trapeze.  500 patrons plucked down 25 cents to view the marvels on opening day, April 14, 1894.

A Kinetoscope Parlor in San Francisco.  Customers could view different very short films at each of the machines.

The idea caught on and more Kinetoscope Parlors were opened in cities across the country.  Over the next few years Edison would churn out hundreds of short films, both actualities filmed on the street of daily life and clips made in the Black Maria.  Edison invited a parade of dancers, jugglers, circus performers, boxers and wrestlers, vaudeville and Broadway stars to make the trek out to New Jersey.  Many were flattered and others took advantage of the publicity associated with having their name attached to the latest fad.  Several performers from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show including Annie Oakley herself and Sioux Ghost Dancers were filmed.

Other famous films included the Butterfly Dance by Annabelle Whitford which was enhanced by hand tinting and The Kiss featuring plump Broadway stars Mary Irwin and John Rice. 

The Kiss, Edison sells sex in 1896.  Naturally it was his biggest Kintoscope hit.

In 1901 Edison allowed, somewhat reluctantly, the exhibition of his films by projection on a screen in Oberlin, Ohio.  As usual, the French had beaten him to it and he was worried that they would enter the American market so he developed his own projection system.  The innovation made Kinetoscope Parlor obsolete almost overnight.  To accommodate demand for production suited for the screen, Edison made his first film with a plot, The Great Train Robbery in 1903 in the process inventing the western movie and creating the first movie star, Bronco Billy Anderson.

The Black Maria was rendered obsolete for production for the screen.  Edison built a new glass roofed studio in New York and abandoned the old shed in 1901, shortly after the first screenings.  The building was unsentimentally razed in 1903 and its lumber recycled for other use at the laboratory complex.

The second reproduction of the Black Maria is on display at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park on the grounds of the inventor/entrepreneur's New Jersey laboratories,

It was recreated in 1938 for the movie Edison, the Man starring Spencer Tracy and re-erected on the Laboratory ground near the original site.  The National Park Service, which maintains what is now the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, has since built and maintains a replacement reproduction.

Two Milestone Films of Sex in the Cinema

Mary Rice and John Irwin perform as the title promised.

It’s a red letter day for the fans of sex and movies.  Two milestone flicks share anniversaries today.

Back in 1896 Mary Irwin and John Rice, two well known Broadway actors then staring in a hot musical, The Widow Jones, spent an afternoon at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio in East Orange, New Jersey.

The world’s first studio built for the production of motion pictures was hardly an impressive place.  It was essentially a tar paper covered wooden shack slapped together three years earlier at a cost of about $600.  Its most unique feature was a retractable roof over the main studio room to admit sunlight to illuminate the performers in the minute-long shorts Edison was making for exhibition at his Kinescope Parlors.

Edison's Black Maria Studio with the roof open to catch the winter Sun.

The impressively mustachioed Rice and the very plump by modern standards Irwin were there to recreate just one scene from their Broadway show, the climatic kiss.  And kiss they did.  In 47 seconds they flirted, Irwin took Rice’s face in his hands, and the two locked lips semi-passionately for 15 seconds.

When the film, titled simply The Kiss hit the theaters it created a sensation unlike anything Edison had ever before exhibited.  It also outraged moralists and prudes and resulted in the first, but surely not the last, demands for censorship of the new medium. It was the movie’s first block buster and proved to film makers that followed a lesson they never forgot—sex sells.

Sixty-four years later on the same day in 1960 Billy Wilder’s sharp comedy/drama The Apartment opened to rave reviews, sold out houses…and cries for censorship.  Not that the black and white film contained any nudity, foul language, or violence. Star Shirley MacLaine was briefly seen in slip and spend more time well covered by a man’s bathrobe, hell was muttered a couple of times in passing, and MacLaine’s character is slapped by a doctor to rouse her from semi-consciousness after she swallows sleeping pills.   That’s it.

But the situation on which the film turned was considered wildly daring.  A young man, a faceless cog in a giant New York insurance company, rises in the firm as he lends the key to his bachelor apartment to randy executives for afternoon trysts with girl friends and mistresses.  Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond never even used explicit terms for what was going on.  But razor sharp dialoged made it perfectly clear to audiences everywhere.

About a year later, I remember watching the Academy Awards on television as The Apartment was nominated for a slew of Oscars and came away the night’s big winner with five trophies including those for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.  The nominated stars, MacLaine and Jack Lemmon lost out to Elizabeth Taylor, who had been dramatically ill during the balloting, for Butterfield 8 and Burt Lancaster for Elmer Gantry.  I remember that I was mystified why a picture I hadn’t heard of could win so many awards in the year of Spartacus, The Alamo, Exodus, The Sundowners, Inherit the Wind, and even Psycho, all of which I had seen in Cheyenne, Wyoming’s downtown movie palaces.  My folks looked uncomfortable, stammered around trying to answer my questions about it, and flatly forbade me to see if it showed up downtown.

It was a movie that got made because writer/director Wilder wanted to work again with Lemmon after their huge success with Some Like it Hot.  As one of the hottest properties in Hollywood he had no trouble getting the project green lighted despite its racy premise by the independent Mirisch Corporation and the distributor, United Artists. 

The nugget of an idea for the film was jotted down in a one phrase entry into a notebook years earlier after Wilder saw David Lean’s acclaimed 1945 British film about infidelity in a borrowed flat, Brief Encounter.  Wilder had written, “What about the friend who owned the flat?”  With that in mind he and Diamond constructed a brilliant screen play.

With Lemmon on board, casting was the next hurdle.  MacLaine, an ex-dancer and Hollywood up-and-comer after parts in Around the World in 80 Days, Some Came Running, and Can-Can, was an easy choice despite not being a traditional leading lady beauty.  In fact her freckles, red hair, and turned up nose were perfect for the naïve elevator operator who somehow becomes the mistress of a married man.  Veteran character actor and Wilder favorite Ray Walston was perfect as the first supervisor to tempt Lemmon.

The part of the philandering senior executive was harder.  Wilder had always envisioned Paul Douglas, the husky actor who had made a specialty of such roles.  But Douglas died of a heart attack.  After casting around he hit on Fred MacMurray.  His career seemed on the down side and his days as a leading man past.  He had lately worked mostly in little seen westerns and on TV.  His one success had been a Disney throw-away comedy, The Shaggy Dog which had surprised everyone by becoming a hit.  He was in the process of wrangling with Disney for a real contract and the studio wanted to build low budget, high profit family comedies around him.  MacMurray feared that playing the randy, despicable boss would so taint his image that Disney would drop him.  In the end he agreed because he had not had a really meaty part since Double Indemnity 16 years earlier—another Wilder script.

A young Edie Adams rounded out the featured players as the boss’s former lover and Lemmon’s eventual secretary as he rises in the company.

In the film Lemmon is at first pleased as punch as he rises seemingly effortlessly in the company.  He flirts with the pretty elevator operator who notes his floor-by-floor rise.  But demands on his love-nest-for-loan become inconvenient and irksome.  Then he ends up with the suicidal elevator operator on his hands as she despairs the relationship with his cold hearted boss.  He falls in love.  She feels conflicted.  The boss gets outed and his wife leaves him.  He wants former mistress back and asks again for the key.  Lemmon refuses and quits.  Girl discovers his sacrifice, overcomes most of her ambivalence, and shows back up at his apartment as he prepares to leave town.  End of slender story.

Lemmon and MacLaine in the quirky end scene of The Apartment.

Like many classic Wilder films, the movie ends with a sharp line.  The girl picks up the cards from the gin games with which they had passed time before.  Lemmon attempts to proclaim his feelings.  The girl says, “Shut up and deal.”

Today The Apartment seems about as sexually daring as The Kiss.  A remake would have much more attractive actors, a lot of swearing, plenty of skin, and sweaty love scenes.  It would be a rom-com romp with a much less ambiguous ending.  But it wouldn’t be a better picture.