He said it, not I. On movies today: “They suck. It’s unbelievable how bad movies have been, right. I mean, it’s just I haven’t seen a run of this, a crop of movies

. . . It’s a very entrepreneurial world, and I think you will see that right itself with time in it. But, right now today it’s a particularly dreary moment.”

The speaker is Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks co-founder and movie mogul, earlier this month. I’ll be quoting his words next time some Hollywood person asks me why critics are so mean.

Two screenwriters whose films have collectively earned $1.5 gajillion dollars are taking K-berg’s rant to the next level. They’re asking why movies suck. And if they must suck, do they really need to suck as heinuously as “Green Lantern” or “Little Fockers”? In their new book “Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!” Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon provide a smart sequel to the scripting-and-snarking memoirs of William Goldman. Just so long as you’re OK with a Goldman who wrote “Balls of Fury” and “Let’s Go to Prison” instead of “Marathon Man” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

But why should you care to hear a lament about the state of movies from the writers of “Herbie Fully Loaded”?

Answer: Because blaming a screenwriter for a movie is like blaming Julia Child for how your cake turned out.

Tom and Ben, as they are known, have skills. As anyone who has ever seen their TV series “Reno 911” or the movie that resulted from it knows, these guys are funny. True, they wrote “Night at the Museum” and its sequel, but you can’t argue with a gross of nearly $1 billion.

They’re probably too talented to be working in the low-paying format of outdated entertainment delivery devices called “books.” So why are they sharing their wisdom with you? Because they don’t want to direct (“Directing a film isn’t a full-time job, it’s TEN full-time jobs . . . and while you’re making three hundred decisions a day: there are people around you who are QUESTIONING THE THREE HUNDRED DECISIONS YOU’RE MAKING EVERY DAY.”) So without going back to cable, this is pretty much their only surefire way of getting their actual jokes (and surprisingly sage advice about how show business really works) to you.

Movies suck because:

* Wall Street sucks. There are so many rich jerks making money in hedge funds that the money bubbles up through the dirt in LA like oil in “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Hollywood is happy to cash checks from Greenwich horndogs who want to meet Anna Faris. So way too many movies get made. Bill Simmons writes on the online magazine Grantland that, just as Alex Smith has a job because there have to be 32 NFL quarterbacks at any given moment, Hollywood pretends it has 40 movie stars at any given moment. They keep making Jim Carrey movies even though there are no longer any Jim Carrey fans.

“Hollywood knows we’re not paying attention, so they try to manipulate us into thinking Carrey is still a movie star by inundating us with billboards and commercials featuring his mug,” Simmons writes. “After all, he still looks like Jim Carrey, right? Even if we reject the assault by skipping the movie in droves, the movie would have to bomb more brutally than the Situation at the Trump Roast for the star’s career to be threatened. (A good example: Mike Myers after ‘The Love Guru.’)”

Simmons continues: “The truth is, most people don’t know how to define a ‘movie star.’ Take Tobey Maguire: Unless his next movie has ‘Spider-Man’ in the title, are people going out of their way to see it? Of course not. That means he’s not a movie star. Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for ‘Ray,’ but that didn’t make him a movie star; he’s just a famous person who acts and sings.”

And don’t forget that:

* Movie stars suck. Every movie star, to some extent, writes the movie they star in, according to Lennon and Garant. Their advice? “Listen carefully, and incorporate all of their notes. Some of their notes will likely be TERRIBLE or half-baked. But guess what — you’re gonna do those notes too. Remember, if you can get a movie star to like your writing and even know your name, you become INFINITELY more powerful in Hollywood.” If you disagree with anything the star wants, you will get fired “before you even walk back to your car.” Movie stars also get to sign off on their directors, and:

* Directors suck. “Director,” say Garant and Lennon, “is the only entry-level position left in the movie business. You can’t START as the property master or sound mixer. Or even as the assistant director. You have to work your way up. The only job you can get on a movie set with no experience whatsoever is: director. So is it like joining the Army and being made a four-star general on the same day? Yes, it is. And it happens all the time.” But even directors have to take orders from studios. And guess what?

* Studios suck. A great script may go nowhere if it doesn’t get good “coverage.” And what is that? A summary of your movie written by a young, entry-level worker, maybe even an intern. Moreover, there’s a reason, as the writers put it, that “You can make ‘The Pacifier’ with Vin Diesel, then make almost the exact same movie five years later and call it ‘The Spy Next Door.’ ” That reason is: Studio executives aren’t worrying about how to make good movies. They’re worrying about how not to get fired, and if they make a movie just like some other movie they can say, “It worked before. Who knew it wouldn’t work again? Can I please stay in this nice comfy office?”

Movies, especially comedies, often sell on the basis of “pitches” — brief outlines that the writers act out in the exec’s presence. Why is the writer’s ability to act suddenly critical to whether a movie gets made? Because executives hate to read. They just want to watch. And the pitch boils down to two things, say Tom and Ben. One is making sure the main character is the kind of flawed but amazing character a movie star wants to play. The other is a new idea that is easy to describe in terms of other successful films: “Invoking the name of a film that has MADE A TON OF MONEY in your pitch is never a bad thing in Hollywood. For example: “It’s ‘Die Hard’ meets ‘Home Alone’ — set at a Chuck E. Cheese. PG. But instead of Bruce Willis to the rescue, it’s an 8-year-old. And Hans Gruber is an animatronic raccoon gone haywire.”

Each studio employs a long line of story-overseeing “executives.” Some of these executives aren’t very smart. Some of them are there solely because their grandfather used to be president of the studio. Most of them are soon going to be fired. Any one of them can ruin your film.

In telling a true tale of modern horror — the making of “Herbie Fully Loaded” — the screenwriters say that they had worked out a script that then-Disney president Nina Jacobson (“Brilliant woman who tried to prevent M. Night Shyamalan from making ‘Lady in the Water’ ”) loved and green-lit. Then, with the next draft, they were suddenly dealing with a lower executive who changed everything by adding a bunch of dumb ideas, fired them, and then burned through 24 more writers. Sometimes this happens because “the executives or producers see themselves as writers; sometimes it’s because they think they know better than the president; but more often than not, it’s just because they don’t understand the basic idea that the president liked and bought,” say the screenwriters. Or a movie may get bought regardless of whether the story works because:

* China sucks. You hate China. I hate China. Everybody hates China — for now. In 20 years, when Hollywood is done re-educating us, we’ll all feel as warm and fuzzy about China as we do about Derek Jeter. Because movies are happy to put ridiculously pro-China propaganda in films like “The Karate Kid” remake and “2012” in return for a) large checks from China and b) approval to open their movies in China’s fast-growing multiplex market. The upcoming “Red Dawn” remake just digitally switched the villains from Chinese to North Koreans. The North Korean army couldn’t conquer the Purdue football dorm, much less the entire center of the country. How convincing a movie is that going to be? If they’re going to do a comedy, they might as well go all the way and imagine the heartland being ransacked by Luxembourgian paratroopers. Or Belgian gnomes, who are a great example of how:

* Marketing sucks. Was anyone you know looking forward to a Smurfs movie? Even kids don’t know about Belgium’s most irritating export. Their NBC TV show went off the air in 1989. But the movie exists because of its cross-platform promotional potential: It has more than 200 (not a misprint) marketing partners. Sony also figured that parents of small children remember the TV series (we do: it sucked), so that meant “brand awareness” was high and did half the marketers’ work for them. Brand awareness is key if you’re going to burn $150 million on a movie. If they don’t know the basic story going in, how are you going to explain it in a 30-second commercial? See also: adaptations of TV shows, remakes and “Sex and the City 2.” There’s even going to be a movie version of the game of Battleship. Having a toy tie-in didn’t hurt “Transformers.” But you saw “Transformers,” so really the problem is:

* You suck. What Katzenberg wittily calls “that singular and unique characteristic that only exists in Hollywood, greed” is inseparable from taste: If the crowds demand cinematic Funyuns, someone is going to produce them, and get rich in the process. Audiences get stuck on “No Strings Attached,” go with “Just Go With It” and sail away on “Stranger Tides” at “World’s End.” You want better movies? Be a better audience. The San Francisco-based critic David Thomson told me last year, “I think the most compelling figure in the movies at the moment is the audience. Because the audience are going crazy.” I know what you’re thinking: Yes, he does get to say “are” because he’s English.

“Herbie Fully Loaded” may have been a film about (in the words of filmblather.com) “a stupid anthropomorphic VW Bug that winks, smiles, gets antenna boners when it sees a yellow, ‘female’ Bug and . . . occasionally exhibits psychotic behavior.” But even after Disney hired every Hollywood writer above the level of the guy who writes the questions for Brooke Burke to ask the contestants on “Dancing with the Stars,” it still only cost $50 million, according to Boxofficemojo.com. It provided lots of marketing opportunities — and grossed $144 million in theaters alone. Even Disney was probably shocked. As Bill Goldman put it, “Nobody knows anything.”

The audience loves broad jokes and cheap thrills, and will punish any movie that doesn’t deliver them, one after another.

In the 1990s Johnny Depp made really deep, interesting, odd movies like “Ed Wood.” Nobody saw ’em. Now that he’s cashing $50 million paychecks, he can afford lots of interesting things to do in his spare time. Six years ago he bought the rights to a Nick Hornby book — a dark comedy about four people who happen to meet on the same rooftop on New Year’s Eve because they all plan to jump off it. That movie is still in development. So if even a huge star like Johnny Depp wanders off the beaten path, Hollywood is reluctant to follow. But everyone is looking forward to making “Pirates of the Caribbean Meet Sigmund and the Sea Monsters 3D.”