Kurt Russell Unknowingly Destroyed A Priceless Artifact In The Hateful Eight

If you're any kind of guitar aficionado, you might want to skip this article. Then again, if you're any kind of guitar aficionado, there's a good chance you've heard this gory story already. As for the rest of you, please know that I am absolutely serious when I tell you that this is a tragedy.

For 191 years, C.F. Martin & Company have been crafting beautiful acoustic guitars. They are precious instruments. If you've ever taken one across your lap and strummed an open G chord over its sound hole, you know its tone is unmistakably deep and resonant. You also know that a new Standard Series Martin will set you back anywhere between $2,500 to just under $10,000. So it should go without saying that an antique Martin from the 1870s would probably be valued somewhere in the five-figure range, but is really priceless.

So I'm not entirely sure what the Martin Guitar Museum was thinking when they loaned out an acoustic guitar of that vintage from their collection for use in the production of Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight" — especially without insisting on having a supervisor on set. You want to believe everyone is acting in good faith and trust that most film sets in our modern era are run with the utmost professionalism, but making movies is hard work and, well, accidents will happen.

And some accidents aren't fixable, as Martin was painfully reminded when Kurt Russell accidentally smashed that 140-plus year guitar into a wooden post.

How does someone "accidentally" smash a priceless guitar? According to Guitar World, the mistake occurred during the scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh's antagonistic prisoner "Crazy" Daisy Domergue begins to strum a tune at the blizzard-bound Minnie's Haberdashery. She's been gleefully stomping all over the ragged last nerve of Kurt Russell's bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth, so we're waiting for this utterly humorless man to explode. He does so by grabbing the guitar from Daisy and busting it up into unplayable shape.

Leigh's stunned reaction to Russell's outburst? That ain't acting. She knew in the moment that he was destroying the 1870s Martin. As for Russell, he swears he was oblivious.

Precautions had obviously been taken to spare the Martin this grisly fate. "There were six doubles made," said Academy Award-winning sound mixer Mark Ulano. "The guitar was from the 1870s 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."

Per Russell, here's what happened next:

"On that day, I said, 'How far do you want me to go?' [Tarantino] said, 'Just go until I say stop,' I said, 'So if you don't say stop I smash the guitar?' He said, 'Yep, great, just keep going.' I just kept going and going and going, and I took the thing and I said the line – music time's over, or whatever it was – and I said, yeah, he wants me to smash it, so I smashed the guitar.

Then we cut and [Leigh] was... 'I can't believe that just happened.' I was like, 'What?' She said, 'You just smashed the real guitar.'"

Everyone felt horrible, but the damage had literally been done. And once Martin caught wind of the accident, they were devastated. They also voiced a subtle degree of skepticism over the production's explanation.

Martin initially thought something had fallen on the guitar off-camera. When Martin Museum Director Dan Boak got the official story, he was, to put it mildly, perplexed. Per Boak:

"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."

Though the Martin Museum was reimbursed for the value of the guitar (reportedly in the neighborhood of $45,000), they stressed that money wasn't their concern. It was the very existence of the guitar, which was now beyond repair. As a result, the Museum now refuses to lend out any of their instruments for use in film productions.

Russell has since shrugged off the accident, claiming that the value of the guitar skyrockets in value every time the story is re-told. As for Leigh, an actor renowned for her preternatural sensitivity, she's still traumatized. "I was heartbroken about the guitar, because I was quite in love with it," she told Billboard. "I got to actually take it home with me, and I played it every day. It had the most beautiful, warm tone."

Leigh and Russell were the last people to hear that tone (you can watch it get snuffed out in Tarantino's mini-series cut of the film on Netflix). You can say it's just a guitar, but each Martin has its own sonorous voice. And this is one that, 140 years after its creation, has been silenced forever.

Did anyone learn anything here? Martin sure did. If a guitar belongs in a museum, it's probably best to keep it there.