Kurt Russell does not fuck around. That much should be clear by now. So if you don’t want Kurt Russell to destroy your valuable artifact, you should probably make that crystal clear prior to him picking it up. According to a new story in SSN Insider, the crew of The Hateful Eight failed to really internalize that notion: See, in one scene in the movie, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue is playing a guitar, and Russell’s bounty hunter stomps over to her, grabs it, and smashes it to pieces. Turns out that guitar was a priceless antique on loan from the Martin Guitar Museum, and they are less than thrilled to learn what happened. Mark Ulano, the film’s sound mixer, recounts a story about just what went wrong.
The guitar was a loner from the Martin Guitar Museum and there were six doubles made. The guitar was from the 1870’s 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.
Ulano says the museum’s original response to being told about the accident was surprisingly agreeable: “Do you need another one and can we please have all the pieces to display in our museum?” Unfortunately, that’s because the museum hadn’t heard the whole story. Needless to say, when museum head Dick Boak learned about the actual events, he was…displeased. Reverb has his thoughts on the matter.
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.
Boak says that the museum will no longer loan their guitars to movies, under any circumstances, as a result of this incident. “We want to make sure that people know that the incident was very distressing to us,” Boak insists, probably while cradling the shattered remnants of his irreplaceable guitar. Also, we can’t confirm this, but when asked to comment, Kurt Russell probably grimaced and said, “Mmm-hmmm, tragic. Say, can you hand me that ukulele over there?”