The Black Maria ( ) was Thomas Edison's film production studio in West Orange, New Jersey. It was the world's first film studio. History In 1893, the world's first film production studio, the Black Maria, or the cinematographic Theater, was completed on the grounds of Edison's laboratories at West Orange, New Jersey, for the purpose of making film strips for the Kinetoscope. Construction of the building, which included a tar-paper-covered dark studio room with a retractable roof, began in December 1892 and was completed the following year at a cost of $637.67 ($ in dollars). In early May 1893 at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Edison conducted the world's first public demonstration of films shot using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria, with a Kinetoscope viewer. The exhibited film showed three people pretending to be blacksmiths. The first motion pictures made in the Black Maria were deposited for copyright by W. K. Dickson at the Library of Congress in August, 1893. In early January 1894, The Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (aka Fred Ott's Sneeze) was one of the first series of short films made by Dickson for the Kinetoscope in Edison's Black Maria studio with fellow assistant Fred Ott. The short film was made for publicity purposes, as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper's Weekly. It was the earliest motion picture to be registered for copyright — composed of an optical record of Ott sneezing comically for the camera. The first films shot at the Black Maria included segments of magic shows, plays, vaudeville performances (with dancers and strongmen), acts from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, various boxing matches and cockfights, and scantily-clad women. Many of the early Edison moving images released after 1895, however, were non-fictional "actualities" filmed on location: views of ordinary slices of life — street scenes, the activities of police or firemen, or shots of a passing train. On Saturday, April 14, 1894, Edison's Kinetoscope began commercial operation. The Holland Brothers(Andrew M. Holland and George C. Holland) opened the first Kinetoscope Parlor at 1155 Broadway in New York City and for the first time, they commercially exhibited movies, as we know them today, in their amusement arcade. Patrons paid ¢25 ($ in dollars) as the admission charge to view films in five kinetoscope machines placed in two rows. Nearly 500 people became cinema's first major audience during