The destruction of a 145-year-old Martin guitar in Quentin Tarantino’s film, The Hateful Eight, is embedded into guitar folklore. But what if it was no accident?
A former Martin employee has just blown the story wide open. He doesn’t believe the narrative that has been told over the past 11 years. He says Tarantino wanted it destroyed.
Set in Wyoming Territory during the 1870s, the Academy Award-winning flick follows Kurt Russell’s bounty hunter, John “the Hangman” Ruth. He has captured Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue when they get caught in a blizzard and are forced to seek shelter.
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Domergue is a guitarist, and so Leigh was handed a period-correct Martin, believed to be worth around $15,000 to practice on, so she could authentically strum away on set.
In the film, Ruth gets annoyed by her constant string fiddling, and at one point, takes the acoustic guitar off her and smashes it to pieces. The story goes that it was a tragic mixup that saw the ancient Martin – and not a prop guitar – destroyed during the scene. That might not be the case.
“Tarantino filmed it at night on purpose so that the guitar tech wouldn’t be there,” Dick Boak, Martin’s now retired in-house historian tells the Gear Gab Podcast with Eric Dahl podcast.
“He [the tech] had gone home, and they never brought the papier-mâché guitars out. They just had the regular guitar,” he claims. “She [Leigh] played her little thing, and Kurt Russell grabbed it out of her hands.”
The ‘mixup’ has since become stuff of legend, with what’s left of the guitar even put on display at the Martin booth at NAMM 2024. The guitar had been loaned to the filmmakers from the Martin Museum – a place where it neighbors Kurt Cobain relics and haunted guitars – and didn’t come back in one piece.
In fact, Boak says he feared the incident would get him sacked. But Tarantino is Tarantino; he only ever makes movies his way.
“Tarantino wanted to get a genuine reaction out of her,” Boak says of the scene. “And yeah, he did. I’ll never forget it, you know – the reaction on her face and everything from that.”
Martin has since, and rather understandably, changed its loan policy for museum instruments after Russell’s cowboy Pete Townshend impression. No other production company is going anywhere near its artefacts.
Apparently there were six prop models made, to spare the priceless Martin a gruesome fate. Moreover, Russell was egged on to treat the guitar like it owed him a sizeable wad of cash that fateful day on set. The actor, in turn, says he doesn’t care about the guitar’s destruction, and believes the whole thing has been blown out of proportion.
Boak’s claims add a fresh twist to the tale, and, if anything, steep even more prominence onto the poor instrument.
