There's a scene in Quentin Tarantino's 2015 Western, The Hateful Eight, where Kurt Russell grabs Jennifer Jason Leigh's guitar and smashes it against a wooden column.
Turns out that wasn't just any old guitar — it was a priceless 1870s Martin acoustic on loan from the Martin Guitar Museum.
"The guitar was a loaner from the Martin Guitar Museum and there were six doubles made," the film's sound mixer Mark Ulano said on a panel following a screening in Hollywood in 2015. "The guitar was from the 1870s and was priceless. What was supposed to happen was we were supposed to go up to that point, cut, and trade guitars and smash the double. Well, somehow that didn't get communicated to Kurt, so when you see that happen on the frame, Jennifer's reaction is genuine. Kurt shattered the antique guitar and everyone was pretty freaked out. Tarantino was in a corner of the room with a funny curl on his lips, because he got something out of it with the performance."
But the Martin Guitar Museum had a different take. "We were informed that it was an accident on set," Dick Boak, director of the museum told Reverb in February 2016. "We assumed that a scaffolding or something fell on it. We understand that things happen, but at the same time we can't take this lightly. All this about the guitar being smashed being written into the script and that somebody just didn't tell the actor, this is all new information to us. We didn't know anything about the script or Kurt Russell not being told that it was a priceless, irreplaceable artifact from the Martin Museum."
Boak told Reverb that Ulano's claim about the museum offering a replacement was false. In fact, "as a result of the incident, the company will no longer loan guitars to movies under any circumstances," Boak said.
"Upon inspection of the pieces, we realized that the guitar was beyond fixing. It's destroyed," Boak told Reverb. "We want to make sure that people know that the incident was very distressing to us. We can't believe that it happened. I don't think anything can really remedy this. We've been remunerated for the insurance value [$40,000], but it's not about the money. It's about the preservation of American musical history and heritage."
In 2022, a Twitter user who claimed to be on the set of The Hateful Eight wrote, "I was 10 feet from the incident….only QT [Quentin Tarantino] and Kurt knew he was going to smash it. IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT. It elicited the reaction Q needed from Jennifer… she was shaken up, as she had the guitar months before production to learn her song, but ultimately understood."
But Leigh sounds far from understanding. "I was heartbroken about the guitar, because I was quite in love with it," she told Billboard in 2016. "I got to actually take it home with me, and I played it every day. It had the most beautiful, warm tone."
Previously:
• The Hateful Eight's homage to The Thing: shots compared
• 'The Hateful Eight' trailer is out. Quentin Tarantino's 8th film looks pretty great.
• Sleuthing from public sources to figure out how the Hateful Eight leaker was caught
