Perhaps the biggest surprise in the forthcoming John Cusack movie War, Inc. comes in the opening credits, which reveal that the movie's screenplay is by Cusack, Jeremy (Bulworth) Pikser, and Mark Leyner. Leyner, now 52, was that rarest of things, a genuine literary star in the 1990s, when such books as Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroentesterologist were both critically acclaimed and commercially trendy. Leyner, whose writing danced on the line between experimental meta-fiction and stand-up comedy, was a popular get for magazine profiles and a welcome guest on the David Letterman and Conan O'Brien talk shows. But after his 1998 novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville, he slipped from view. Where's he been all this time? Trying to break into writing for TV and movies, it appears. He developed "a pilot about a kilt-wearing, punk rock surgeon for MTV called Iggy Vile, M.D." and wrote scripts for the acclaimed mental-health-ward network drama Wonderland, which ABC cancelled almost instantly--before, in fact, any of the episodes Leyner worked on had a chance to air. One upshot of that was that he met the show's medical consultant, Billy Goldberg, who would collaborate with Leyner on two books of goofball medical questions-and-answers, Why Do Men Have Nipples? and Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? That must have seemed an amusing goof for someone who'd been touted as an important, form-redefining writer and a doctor who'd gotten one foot into show business via a cause celebre' TV series. The books sold better "than all of Mr. Leyner’s books combined" and were "spun off into a desk calendar."
Leyner's association with John Cusack began, Cusack says, when the actor "called him up, kind of as a fan, and said, ‘Let’s do something together? Can we do something?’” Today, they worked on a doomed treatment of a movie version of Et Tu, Babe before hatching the idea for the Iraq satire War, Inc. As Leyner sees it, he brings something a little different to the table than his worthy collaborators. “What John and Jeremy might see as the foreground of the movie, I kind of saw it as the background. I’m more interested in other aspects of the movie. The sort of critique of heroic iconology. The idea of a person who’s actively in conflict with himself.” He and Cusack are working on another movie idea, but Leyner has also sketched out a new work of fiction. (No fool, he is also working with Dr. Goldberg on another book of funny medical lore.) Regarding how long it's been since he had to dodge book reviews, he says, “Whatever this period of time has been, I’ve needed it. Given the extremity of my personal identification with that work, I think 10 years is probably sort of minimal. … I made a very conscious decision to try to do other things.”