There was even more destruction in Quentin Tarantino’s bloody Western “The Hateful Eight” than anyone thought. A priceless, 145-year-old guitar, on loan from Pennsylvania’s Martin Guitar Museum, was accidentally smashed to bits by Kurt Russell during filming.
In the scene, Russell, who plays a bounty hunter, who goes by the nickname “The Hangman,” takes the instrument from his prisoner, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, and smashes it against a wall.
According to reports, there were six replicas on hand, and Russell was supposed to swap the real guitar for a double.
But the movie’s sound mixer, Mark Ulano, told industry Web site SSN Insider that the swap plan “somehow . . . didn’t get communicated to Kurt,” adding that Leigh’s shocked reaction was “genuine.”Tarantino, however, seemed delighted. While “everyone was pretty freaked out,” Ulano said, “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.”
Museum director Dick Boak told Reverb magazine they wanted to fix the guitar and asked for the pieces, but it was “destroyed.” He added, “As a result of the incident, the company will no longer loan guitars to movies under any circumstances.”
Boak also claims he didn’t know the guitar-wrecking scene was in the script before they loaned their precious instrument — or even after the smashing. “We were informed that it was an accident on set,” he says. “We assumed that a scaffolding or something fell on it . . . 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.”
Boak added, “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.” “The Hateful Eight” distributor, the Weinstein Co., declined to comment on Friday night.
