From the Black Maria to the Open West: Thomas Edison and Early Action Films

Extra, Extra! Bandits had the bright idea to rob a train and now have a posse in hot pursuit.

There is gunfire, people tied up, and even shot. A fireman is thrown from the moving train. Audiences cowered in fear, as the posse was in hot pursuit, cornering the bandits in a secluded wooded area and dealing out justice.  

This shocking new kind of storytelling was made possible by early innovations at Edison’s Black Maria motion picture studio, where filmmakers first learned how to stage, shoot, and edit dramatic scenes.

The Great Train Robbery of 1903 was the first action and Western film in history, filmed partly inside the Black Maria and partly on location, a groundbreaking approach that closely resembles how modern films are made today.

This is the gist of the 1903, 12 minute epic drama, The Great Train Robbery. Filmed in Milltown, New Jersey and staged inside the Black Maria, the film blended controlled studio shooting with real outdoor locations. Film historians generally consider this Edison Manufacturing Studio’s film to be the first American action film and one the first Western films. It could have been inspired by a 1900 train robbery perpetrated by the famous Butch Cassidy.

The Great Train Robbery surprised viewers so much that they reportedly had the audience ducking behind the seat in front of them, or even running from the theater. In a scene at the end of the film, the camera focuses on the bandit leader, played by Justus D. Barnes, who then empties his hog-legged .45 revolver directly into the camera. 

However, that wasn’t the only wild part of this Western. The man behind the camera and directing was Edwin S. Porter, whose prolific career would eventually include over 250 films made him the most influential filmmaker in the United States. Building on techniques refined inside the Black Maria, director Edwin S. Porter introduced innovations that transformed filmmaking.

Porter was one of the first to use a variety of innovative film techniques in this $150 budgeted classic film including location shooting, minor camera moving, and pan shots. The jump-cuts that he used in editing the film were a new and sophisticated way of showing two events happening at the same time but in different places, making the plot more interesting than it once was.

Action and special effects made The Great Train Robbery thrilling for people in 1903.

If this film reminds you of your old Saturday morning Western skits, you wouldn’t be wrong. What began inside the Black Maria as a bold experiment in action storytelling, and extended beyond just the studio for the first time, became the blueprint for Western films for decades to come. The studio gave early filmmakers like Porter a space to experiment, fail, and refine techniques that would later define narrative cinema.

The iconic scene where shooting gunshots at their feet made the men dance was born in this film. In fact, media historian, James Chapman, believed that the straight at the camera gun shooting may have inspired the gun barrel sequence of the James Bond films!

Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”