Did an Oscar-winning film director destroy a priceless 1800s Martin guitar on purpose?: “Tarantino filmed it at night on purpose so that the guitar tech wouldn’t be there”
If there’s a story that could make any guitarist wince, it’s what happened to a priceless Martin acoustic guitar on the set of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.
If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll remember the scene when Kurt Russell’s character, John “the Hangman” Ruth”, becomes irked by Jennifer Jason Leigh’s “Crazy” Daisy Domergue playing the Australian folk ballad Jim Jones at Botany Bay, and proceeds to snatch the guitar from her hands and smash it.
The filmmakers arranged to borrow an authentic 1870s acoustic guitar from Martin so that Leigh could play a period-correct instrument onscreen, and the original plan was, naturally, for a little bit of screenplay sleight of hand, and for a replica to be the one that was smashed up. Only thing is, communication broke down, and the real 150-year-old Martin was obliterated instead.
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But was the unfortunate incident quite the accident the official story has us believe? Dick Boak, former Martin in-house historian and a veteran of the company’s A&R department, speculates that Quentin Tarantino might have hatched a plan to get the most authentic reaction possible out of Jennifer Jason Leigh.
“Tarantino filmed it at night on purpose so that the guitar tech wouldn’t be there,” he says in a new interview with Gear Gab Podcast with Eric Dahl. “He’d gone home, and they never brought the papier-mâché guitars out. They just had the regular guitar.
“And she played her little thing, and Kurt Russell grabbed it out of her hands. And Tarantino wanted to get the genuine reaction out of her. And yeah, he did, because the reaction – I mean, I’ll never forget it, you know, the reaction on her face and everything from that.”
The incident no doubt led to some serious distress at Martin HQ: “I was so upset,” Boak remembers. “I thought maybe I would even get fired over this.”
Then-Martin CEO Chris Martin saw the upside, though, Boak continues. “He was terrific. He said, ‘It’s fantastic. It’s going to be in a famous movie. The publicity value in the movie is greater than the guitar could ever be.”
The remains of the guitar were later displayed at the Martin booth at the 2024 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California.
Back in 2024, Kurt Russell recounted smashing the priceless 150-year-old Martin on the set of The Hateful Eight: “Jennifer had a number of guitars to work on this song that she was going to sing.
“The one particular guitar that she liked, I guess, was this Martin,” he said. “Nobody ever said that it was 145 years old at the time. It was a Martin, and I remember somebody at the thing saying, ‘I think it’s worth about $15,000.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’”
“Then comes the day to shoot it,” he continued. “I knew that she’d been working on this one guitar, and because I’ve done a thousand shows, I couldn’t even imagine that they were going to be using the one guitar that she was going to be playing, not that it was a priceless Martin guitar. Because it wasn’t. Nobody said that. Nobody made that claim.
“But when we did the take, you can even see it. I kind of give it an extra beat, and nothing. I go ahead and smash the guitar. I can tell – when I grab her and sit her down, I can tell she’s not happy about this. It’s like: Something’s wrong. So as soon as it’s over, I say, ‘Tell me that’s not the guitar you’ve been practicing with,’ and she [nods].”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
