Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, the Martin Guitar Museum will no longer lend its priceless antiques to film productions ever again. That is because Kurt Russell, on the set of The Hateful Eight, inadvertently smashed a 145-year-old instrument to prevent Jennifer Jason Leigh's character from singing.
The film's sound mixer, Mark Ulano, claims that the scene was to be filmed to a point before guitars would be swapped. If you've seen the movie however, the camera rolls on without edits as Mr. Russell takes the 1870s relic and smashes it on the side of a post.
Apparently everyone on set was in on the change--except for Mr. Russell.
For Jennifer, she too thought the scene would cut and resume with a prop guitar instead. As she is knowledgeable of the worth of the guitar, Ms. Leigh's reaction to the event, thus, is totally genuine.
Dick Boak of the Martin museum remarked on the catastrophe:
"We were informed that it was an accident on set. 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."
Since the guitar is beyond repair, the trust that the guitar company will put into future endeavors is slim to none as their faith in handling their products with care clearly has been contended by this incident.
And as Boak continued, the situation is not rooted in financial concern but rather "the preservation of American musical history and heritage."
Nonetheless, check out the event-and reaction-in a clip of the scene below.
