Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Motion Picture Patents Company held a stranglehold on the American film industry in 1908. This organization owned the patents for raw film and controlled every major production and distribution company from Edison to Eastman Kodak. Filmmakers who refused to join this cartel were forced to flee New Jersey and seek refuge in Southern California.
Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists in 1919. This distribution company allowed them to produce and control their own work without the interference of the established studios. The idea had originated a year earlier while the four stars were traveling across the United States selling Liberty bonds to support the World War I effort.
Roger Corman became the king of the new era of low-budget films in the 1960s. He produced up to seven movies a year with frugal budgets and grueling schedules. These films promised sex, wanton violence, and drug use, drawing audiences to independent theaters with content that the major studios could not show.
The Sundance Film Festival was established in 1981. It was led by Robert Redford and Sterling Van Wagenen and provided a new platform for filmmakers like Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino. This event launched the Independent Cinema movement and offered a space for bizarre imagery and defiance of the establishment.
The Blair Witch Project grossed over $248.6 million while spending only $60,000. This film became a symbol of the new accessibility provided by the emergence of camcorders in the 1980s and the arrival of digital video in the 1990s. It proved that independent films could achieve massive commercial success with minimal resources.
The first generation of camera phones, such as the Nokia N95 and the Samsung, were used to create films like Jalachhayam and Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan. These films were the first narrative feature films shot with mobile phones. They demonstrated that high-quality cinema could be created without the need for professional equipment.