Having a 250th birthday may be nice for America, but for New York City, a semiquincentennial is old news. Literally. New York City was founded — depending on who you ask — about 360 years ago, more than a century before the United States. In all that time, we’ve been busy.
New York is widely acknowledged as a hub of industry and creativity, as it should be. Yes, this is the land of Wall Street and Ellis Island, of Stonewall and the Statue of Liberty. But alongside the city’s big landmarks are smaller ones, ones you can't necessarily visit, the quirky ideas that emerged from New York's melting pot and spread across the country.
For the next month, we’ll be celebrating the concepts that came from the city (and our beloved neighbor, New Jersey), talking to experts about how the United States would not be what it is without New York City. You’re welcome, America.
Hollywood’s seeds first sprouted in the Garden State.
Thomas Edison and his assistant William Dickerson invented the Kinetoscope at Edison’s lab in West Orange in the early 1890s. The concept was similar to how film projectors still work: A reel of photos was placed in a sequence that was fed into the machine at speed, with a peephole allowing a person to watch the images come to life. It became the world’s first commercially viable tool for showing motion pictures, and Kinetoscope parlors opened up far and wide.
To make the content for those Kinetoscopes, Edison built the world’s first movie studio at the lab. He called it Black Maria. The entire small, tar paper-covered building was mounted on a turntable, which optimized the space for early film recordings by allowing it to rotate as needed to bring natural light in through a ceiling window.
Hundreds of films were produced at Black Maria over about a decade before the nascent film industry shifted to New York. The original Black Maria was eventually dismantled, but a replica now welcomes visitors at Thomas Edison National Historical Park.
Edison essentially birthed the film industry in the Garden State, and he was also the industry’s first mogul, controlling critical U.S. patents related to motion pictures. That centralized power eventually led to the rise of the Motion Picture Patents Company, a conglomerate of film production companies, including Edison’s own, which allowed the earliest-established production companies to use the patents to standardize how the industry operated but also to stunt upstart challengers’ growth.
The Centaur Film Company became the country’s first independent film production company when it opened in Bayonne in 1907, a homegrown early challenger to the industry’s early powerbrokers. Centaur expanded with a West Coast production unit and opened the first permanent film studio in Hollywood, exporting the industry to California in search of better weather and breathing room from the MPPC’s strict patent enforcement.
New Jersey’s place as the cradle of cinema is well known to cinephiles but largely overlooked by most people. And that bothers Kevin Smith, the creator of "Clerks," a cult classic slice of Jersey culture.
Smith is a native of the Monmouth County bay shore and set his most acclaimed films in the towns he knows best. When his film “Dogma” was criticized by Catholic groups, Smith cheekily joined a protest in Eatontown. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2024.
Smith told Gothamist why he thinks New Jersey should get more recognition for being the birthplace of film, his hope that Netflix’s massive investment down the Jersey Shore will bring the industry home, and what it is about the Garden State that fuels so many artists to this day.
Smith was laid-back, coming off a Q&A with Troma Entertainment co-founder Lloyd Kaufman at Smodcastle Cinemas, the small movie theater in Atlantic Highlands where Smith essentially grew up. He owns it now. After a short drive around town to unwind, Smith sat down in the theater’s office and waxed poetic about New Jersey.
Cinema, Smith said, is just another thing New Jersey made for the world to take.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kevin Smith: I'm biased because I'm a New Jersey filmmaker, but part of the reason I'm a New Jersey filmmaker is because New Jersey was the birthplace of film.
Hollywood started here, which is obviously not technically the case because Hollywood is a place in California. But what we all think of as Hollywood, the movie industry, began at Thomas Edison's Black Maria studio.
As a kid growing up, I was well aware of our role in the movie business, and I was one of those people that lamented the fact that it left. And I understood why one would go west and make that the moviemaking capital of the United States. Better weather, longer hours to shoot, so forth and so on. Of course, later on, it was more about getting as far away from the controlling interests of the original motion picture group, which included Edison.
But the idea that it all started here is so fundamentally important to the history of cinema and is never given the weight that it's due. People think of the movie business and think of California. Were it not for weather, they would be thinking of New Jersey.
Netflix bought Fort Monmouth a few years ago, and they're turning it into a giant movie studio. Back out west, most movie studios and all their soundstages are empty as hell and looking for work. Netflix is one of the only studios that's constantly making stuff, and now they're going to be choosing to make stuff right here in New Jersey, in our backyard. That thrills the youthful version of me. It thrills the old man in me as well, but the kid in me wanted that for just fairness as a child.
It's not like film abandoned New Jersey. They've shot films here for years, with me being one of those filmmakers who actually made films in the state of New Jersey. But I mean, as the seat of industry. If Netflix is the pulse of the business at this point and is the uber-studio, for them to choose New Jersey as a home base for their sound stages really ratifies what most of us already knew: It's in our blood here.
So for me, man, when I think of Jersey cinema, damn skippy, I think of Kevin Smith because I worked hard to make people think of it. And even myself, I've tricked myself into thinking I'm a part of New Jersey film history. I've leaned into that so hard. I branded myself out the gate as a New Jersey filmmaker.
It has everything to do with “Clerks.” It doesn't matter, honestly, what I've done since then or what I do for the rest of my life. That first movie is a magic trick, and it's a Jersey-born magic trick. It ain't “Jaws,” don't get me wrong. It ain't “Star Wars.” But it's my equivalent of pulling a quarter from behind your ear and you go, "Hey, that's clever. Do it for my friend."
That has been my whole career. “Clerks” is me pulling a quarter from behind people's ears. It is elevated by the fact that the guy pulling the quarter is from New Jersey.
People who make art for a living come from every state in America. I'm not saying that's not the case. But an inordinate amount of them come from the Garden State.
There is a degree of authenticity that this state carries with it. That just being from this state, people have lent me credibility I'm not necessarily due. This state is the state of the working-class hero. Our music celebrates the working-class hero by working-class heroes who became worldwide rock stars.
When I was a kid, I would make scrapbooks about my life growing up because I didn't think anyone would ever notice me or celebrate me. So I started celebrating myself. And I think that has to do with why people in New Jersey lean toward the arts. Like, there's this sense of wanting to celebrate oneself, not because you think you're the best at anything necessarily, but because you're an individual from one of the most individual states in the union, man.
A state with so much identity that they make movies about it even when they aren't making those movies right there in the state, man. Like, you don't get a single mob movie we have ever enjoyed without the great state of New Jersey. And you don't get a convenience store movie shot in black and white without the great state of New Jersey.
In New Jersey, for some reason, because we live in the shadow of New York, maybe, there is a chip on our shoulders. Not in a negative way where we're always looking to pick fights, although there is that in the culture as well. But in this way where we feel this need to constantly prove ourselves.
We may be some of the most co-dependent people pleasers in the union, and I think that has everything to do with, like, "Wait, wait, let me show you what I can do."
