I was known as just one thing, as a guy who wrote romantic comedies, which studios were rapidly deciding not to make. Harding became the first American woman to land a triple axel, an extremely difficult jump in which the skater makes three and a half rotations with a forward approach, at the 1991 U.S. Golden in real life actually sat for an interview, much as Janney does in the film, clad in fur with a bird sitting on her shoulder, shown in footage included in The Price of Gold. But before all of this happened, Tonya Harding was a great athlete who was never going to win. The stars are shining on America's service members, past and present, this Veterans Day. Shawn Eckhardt, a friend of Gillooly’s and at one point a bodyguard for Harding, helped orchestrate the plot against Kerrigan. He was 40. They were skating to Mozart and classical music. Toward the end of I, Tonya, Eckhardt’s character says he made the death threat to set off the events that led to the attack on Kerrigan. You know something was a major cultural phenomenon if SNL parodied it, and Eckardt definitely became a household name for all the wrong reasons in the early '90s. There's a great interview that Diane Sawyer does with him. We’ll send you a link.” He finally watched it and he sent me an email saying that he really liked the movie and he liked it way better than “Hope Floats,” which is another movie I wrote. He's a … They want their skaters, especially their female skaters, to be very old-timey versions of what they think women are supposed to be. The scandal received so much national attention that Eckardt was interviewed by Diane Sawyer before being released from prison. It wasn’t at all about what happened. Footage in the documentary shows Harding talking to her mother after a competition, hanging up and saying, “What a bitch.” Harding has claimed that her mother once threw a knife in her direction, a moment that is depicted in the film. I don’t think anyone really believed him. I would imagine there were at least a couple of people who bought his stories and that encouraged him to keep telling them. I want to do something completely different. All rights reserved. Yes, what she was doing was very rebellious. [We found the video on YouTube. I was definitely trying to reinvent myself. It has to be strange to see themselves back in the limelight after almost 25 years. There’s another thing that you get at in the film that younger people might not remember. People are like, a bird on her shoulder? This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. “This is f-cking rigged.” In reality, according to Harding’s comments in The Price of Gold, Harding told them, “Stay out of my face.” But the documentary does confirm the drama over costumes, recalling an incident in which a judge threatened to kick Harding out of a competition for wearing a pink costume she had sewn herself. CNN found out they could get ratings from a story like this. She also came along at this moment in the 90s when punk rock raised its hand and was part of the mainstream for a minute. It was the first. I remember seeing her skate. Also worth reading if you've seen the movie.]. But you know truth, or I should say nonfiction, doesn’t have to make sense, but fiction does have to make sense. Rogers doesn't discuss whether or not he consulted with Fay to hear her side of the story, and that might be because Harding and her mother have not spoken since 2002. One of them included Harding's bodyguard, and what happened to Shawn Eckardt is truly tragic. Figure skating hasn’t changed very much in the last 25 years. Her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly is shown doing much of the same, both before and after they split. He went to jail, he served his time, and he went on with his life. There's other things you can do to disable somebody rather than â you don't need to kill." And the Menendez brothers and Amy Fisher and all of those stories that the media ran with. Tonya was very unapologetically redneck, which was her word, in a sport where the judges want you to be a princess. As depicted in the movie, footage of the immediate aftermath of Kerrigan getting clubbed in the knee after practice at a Detroit ice rink shows the skater surrounded by medics, sobbing and screaming, “Why? Rather than focus on the 1994 attack, I, Tonya instead focuses greatly on Harding's upbringing and the backstory that led up to the unbelievable pre-Olympics controversy. You know assassin, bodyguard business, all these different things, but they weren't true. Still, the movie's screenwriter, Steven Rogers, made sure to interview Gillooly and others so as not to only get Harding's side of the story. And there were parts that she didn’t love, mainly the things that Jeff said happened. “I told them if you can come up with $5,000 for a costume for me, then I won’t have to make it,” she explained. Eckhardt was a self-described espionage expert who said he had ties to a global network. It was spectacular and, athletically, she was better than everyone else on the ice. People might think it was over the top, but then at the end of the movie you can see the real people talking. He would go around and tell people he worked for overseas dictators and he had assassins at his fingertips, which is really funny and really crazy because he obviously didn’t. But I never thought I was just one thing. The New York Times, which announced his death, called him Brian Sean Griffith, which Eckardt changed his name to after getting out of prison. And he's saying the things that we quote in the movie. The latter was released four months early, in September 1995, and he went on to open up a computer business in 2001, according to The New York Times. It’s still about this other thing and not about what Tonya wanted to do. Congratulations on writing a part that won Allison Janney an Academy Award. It was the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle, and we were told that this is the villain and this is the princess and that was about it. I don’t know yet. Why? She was definitely glad to get her version of events out there because she felt like she didn’t have that voice before. “My heart was just racing.”. It was very liberating to be able to go as big as I wanted because everything that Paul says, that Shawn the bodyguard says in the movie, is what he really said. Shawn Eckhardt pleaded guilty to racketeering and served 15 months in prison. “Suck my d-ck,” she tells them after one competition. He died at age 40, I think in 2007. I interviewed Tonya beforehand and I interviewed Jeff Gillooly beforehand and I kept in touch with them. The movie includes many scenes depicting Harding’s mother both physically and emotionally abusing her. Eckardt was … So it was great to walk up those eight steps. We never got a very nuanced version of their story. When you look closer at the details, the entire tale is far weirder than you could imagine. “My stomach was in my throat,” Harding says of the moment in the documentary 30 For 30: The Price of Gold. And it’s true, depending on whose point of view you believe. Both Golden and Gillooly, who later changed his name to Jeff Stone, have denied the allegations of abuse. I'm looking for what I'm going to do next. There is no other person than Brian Griffith," following the bodyguard's passing. Eckardt then set up the attack on Kerrigan with a hit man, Shane Stant, and Derrick Smith, Stant's uncle. As Rogers wrote in the LA Times, Gillooly and Harding had different ideas about how everything went down. Her costumes weren't good enough because she had to make them. I know that’s a big deal in your profession. "Tonya and Jeff remembered almost nothing the same way," Rogers said. Or was there some crumb of truth that he expanded into his crazy story? Yes, she was. Although police never figured out who called in the threat in real life, it’s the anonymous call in the movie that inspires Gillooly’s character to cook up a plan against Kerrigan. Rogers talked to us a couple of days after the Academy Awards and he was in a great mood to talk about his movie. Now, everything has changed so much, you can actually just watch a news station and get almost all opinion, depending on what your personal point of view is. You’re coming off this amazing success. The Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan Saga, Part 8 - YouTube I know that Jeff didn’t believe him. Harding's "bodyguard" Shawn Eckhardt claimed he oversaw an international special operations force and his delusions of espionage played a huge part in the assault on Kerrigan. Fake Spies & Imaginary Assassins: How Writer Steven Rogers Captured the Craziness in 'I, Tonya', Hallmark's Navy-Themed 'USS Christmas' Movie Now Has a Release Date, 'We Stand United for Our Veterans': See How Celebrities Honored Military Heroes, Memoir by Iraq War Vet Sen. Tammy Duckworth Coming Out March 30, Veteran Comic Gets Serious About 'Mental Hell and Wellness'. Write to Mahita Gajanan at mahita.gajanan@time.com. Steven Rogers has enjoyed a successful Hollywood career as the writer of mainstream romantic comedies like "Hope Floats," "Stepmom," "Kate & Leopold" and "Love the Coopers." I think Jeff was a little confused as to why we were even making the movie. I responded to the story about Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly, who were sort of reduced to just a punchline.