Antique Martin guitar was destroyed during filming of latest Tarantino movie
Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, The Hateful Eight, is a blood-stained snow western that throws bounty hunters and outlaws together in a rustic stagecoach lodge. The eight gunslingers are thrust together while seeking shelter from an encroaching storm in post-Civil War Wyoming. The standard version of the film clocks in at a staggering 167 minutes, and weaves gratuitous violence into a captivating story in true Tarantino fashion.
Amidst the deception, vengeance, and murder in Tarantino’s racially charged whodunit, an old six-string is strummed by Daisy Domergue, who is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. An infuriated John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth, played by Kurt Russell, snatches the instrument, and smashes it against a support beam. As Ruth takes a mighty swing with the guitar, Domergue protests in terror, and seems to break into hysterics as the splinters of the freshly obliterated acoustic fall to the floor. The desperate pleas and frenzied panic of Leigh’s character in this scene weren’t simply acting. They were genuine displays of horror as Kurt Russell unknowingly smashed a priceless antique Martin guitar from the 1870s, rather than one of several replicas on hand for the shoot.
The guitar, which was on loan from the Martin Guitar Museum, was a 145-year-old model with an insured monetary value of about $40,000 USD. The film’s Academy Award-winning sound mixer Mark Ulano relayed the story to SSN Insider as a member of a post-screening panel. After Kurt Russell destroyed the guitar, Ulano says “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,” and the director simply kept filming. Ulano said that the Martin Guitar Museum representatives only asked two questions when informed of the incident: “Do you need another one and can we please have all the pieces to display in our museum?”
Ulano’s account of the aftermath was later disputed by Dick Boak, director of the museum, archives, and special projects for C.F. Martin & Co. Boak told Reverb.com that he was unaware of the details of the incident prior to seeing their article, and told a very different story than Ulano did to SSN Insider.
Boak said that he was informed that there had been an accident on set, but the severity and cause of the damage wasn’t disclosed. In an interview with Reverb, Boak said, “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 also stated that Martin never offered a replacement as Ulano told SSN Insider, and in fact the company will no longer lend instruments to films under any circumstances. Although Boak did admit that the company had asked for the pieces of the guitar, it was not to display them in their museum as Ulano said, but rather for a possible restoration.
“Upon inspection of the pieces, we realized that the guitar was beyond fixing,” Boak said. “It’s destroyed.”
C.F. Martin & Co. were remunerated for the insurance value of the guitar, but Boak says “It’s not about the money. It’s about the preservation of American musical history and heritage.”