Sorry I haven't had a chance to respond to this sooner, and I'll have a longer response later.
But the articles are very much true. It might sound like a line, but Hollywood really does hate you, the average American. The town exists in a bubble, a walled off fortress of money with all the mirrors pointing inwards. The general attitude of the town is probably just the same that that the French nobility had - a sense of natural superiority to all the greate unwashed just outside the gates.
It goes for Disney as well. In the past, Disney was always outside the Hollywood mainstream, this funny little company with their bizzare little amusement parks. But Disney is mainstream now and filled with the same types that inhabit all the other studios. No one cares about "Disney" anymore, it's just a place to get your resume stamped as you climb the corporate ladder.
The one bit I'll add at the moment what I see as a related problem to the one mentioned in the follow-up article (where education has overtaken talent as the measure of worth).
Most people working in Hollywood today have never experienced real life. They've grown up in industry families or always wanting to work in Hollywood. They go to school to learn about filmamking and then just right into a job. But they've never existed outside in a place that doesn't revolve around entertainment.
They are left without the experience of holding a real job, of raising a family, of the tramas and triumphs of normal people. And so they're only "experience" of life comes from movies and television shows. They can play a great game of 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon', but they can't tell you what it's like to see the birth of their child or experience the death of a loved one.
When Walt Disney made a movie, it was because he felt what the characters were going through. He was Dumbo, the kid everyone else picked on; he was 'Pinochio' lost in the big and scary world because he had found himself a teenager in France during WWI.
That's why we go to movies and read stories in the first place - we want to learn how to deal with the issues in our lives. Bambi is remembered not because of pretty flowers, but because it teaches childern about growing up; a generation latter that same lesson is taught anew in The Lion King. The successful movies are the ones that mean something. The rest becomes pretty lights and loud explosions that are soon forgotten.
Amoung all the comic books and television series remakes and all the sequels, Hollywood is quickly forgetting how to make movies that people actuall care about. They've gotten very good at getting teenagers to the theaters on a single Friday night, but after that the films are tossed aside like a used popcorn bag. Hollywood can't last long making a $250 million disposable product.
