Fake Stories & Real Items: Kurt Russell and the Guitar

Occasionally an item makes its way onto a movie set that has real-world value outside of the “silver screen.” In a world where most props are manufactured or procured strictly to serve a purpose in a film, these real-world items have been seen on major feature films. In this episode, we’ll talk about a few of these, and a mishap that ended in one of these rare items being destroyed on-screen! Then we chat with Comedian Brandon Koss!

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We all know that there are entire art departments and prop departments that are responsible for finding and sometimes making the props that we see in films. But when I was researching this week’s episode, I became really curious about things used as props in films that are real. Things that have real significance, value or history outside the context of the film that were used in the movie.

One of these is something we already did a story on. If you find the episode called “Stuart Little and the Hungarian Masterpiece,” we tell the story of how a painting used as set decoration was recognized as a rare and valuable painting that had been lost to history. No one on the set knew about its value or history.

What other valuable and real items were used in films or television?

There’s a story about Battlestar Galactica – the 2003 version of the show where Commander Adama destroys an antique wooden model of a ship. The character, played by Edward James Olmos, is angry in the episode of the show called “Maelstrom,” and there’s apparently a ship he’s been building and in anger he smashes the model ship. Well the story goes that the ship was a real model borrowed from a museum – an actual wooden antique valued at $100,000. Now this story has gone around Hollywood for a decade, but one prop master for the show claims that it’s a fake story and the ship was just a prop bought from a mail-order company and cost a couple hundred bucks.

Occasionally, real items sneak their way onto sets as a homage. For instance, in the Princess Bride, Rob Reiner really wanted Mark Knopfler to do the music and he only agreed to do it if Reiner would somehow insert one of his favorite pieces of movie memorabilia into the film. He loved the film Spinal Tap and wanted the iconic hat that Reiner wears in the film to be in Princess Bride. So if you look at the scenes in the young boy’s bedroom – these are the scenes with Fred Savage and Peter Falk, the naval style “Ooral Sea” ball cap is seen hanging up behind the bed.

Along that same line, the film Gone with the Wind features props from another classic film, but you’d never know it. In the scene where Atlanta is burning, the actual things that are burning are backgrounds that were used in the filming of the 1933 King Kong six years earlier.

Today’s story, however is all about a guitar that was featured in the film Hateful Eight.

That was a clip from 1978’s National Lampoon’s Animal House. Bluto, played by John Belushi, takes the guitar from the guy and smashes it against the wall and hands it back to him. The guy playing the guitar was a friend of John Landis, the director, and was an actual professional musician, Stephen Bishop. And while he knew it was coming, he was still surprised when they shot the scene, which wasn’t in the original script. They shot the scene twice and Belushi signed the pieces of the broken guitar. Some of the small pieces were given to cast members, but Stephen Bishop, whose character was simply called “Charming Guy with Guitar” (side note: Bishop shows up in at least 4 other John Landis movies and is always named some generic name with the word “Charming”), anyway – Stephen Bishop still has most of the broken guitar as a souvenir. When Belushi smashed it and the audiences saw it in theaters, they cheered. This was the late 70s and they were rejecting the sappy love songs of their parents. But in this instance, the guitar was meant to be smashed. It was part of the scene and the prop master specifically procured it – possibly two of them, since they shot it twice, for this scene.

In today’s story, we’re talking about a different type of guitar. First, let’s look at the scene:

What you just saw was from the film Hateful Eight, directed by Quentin Tarantino and released in 2015. It’s about a Bounty Hunter and his prisoner and their journey through a Wyoming Winter. They end up in this cabin and in the scene we’re talking about, Daisy – played by Jennifer Jason Leigh – is playing the song Jim Jones at Botany Bay, which is an Australian folk song. She’s sitting playing this guitar and Kurt Russel yells “music time is over,” grabs the guitar from her hands and smashes it against one of the wooden beams of the cabin. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s face shows a look of shock and horror. And she wasn’t acting. Because Kurt Russell had just made a huge mistake. If you watch the clip, you can actually see her looking off toward the crew members because she knew what happened.

The props department for the film had arranged for six different copies of the guitar and it was one of those copies that was supposed to be smashed. So the camera was supposed to show Daisy playing the guitar, then there would be cut. They’d swap in one of the 6 duplicate guitars and that was the one that was supposed to be smashed. But let’s talk about the real guitar.

To be authentic to the period film, set in 1877, they located an incredibly rare guitar. It was a priceless, one-of-a-kind 145-year old Martin Guitar on loan from the Martin Guitar Museum. Jennifer Jason Leigh had been so fortunate throughout the shooting of the movie to have taken it home on several occasions to rehearse with it. She had fallen in love with the warm tones of this 1860s Martin Parlor guitar and even asked about the price tag because she wanted to buy it after the film wrapped. They had told her it was a $4,000 guitar. The real price tag was probably closer to $40,000. It was that guitar that she was playing in the scene. And whether or not the error was Russell’s or Tarantino’s – one or maybe both of them didn’t know that it wasn’t one of the fake guitars – Russell had been told to keep going until he hears cut, so he smashed the guitar – the REAL guitar – and that’s why we get such a genuine reaction from Jennifer Jason Leigh, yelling “Whoa whoa whoa” as an authentic reaction. The guitar was often referred to as priceless because it’s one of the oldest playable Martin guitars in existence. They told Kurt that he just smashed a $15,000 guitar. Later on, it was explained that guitar was worth $25,000. Then by the time the story was told a few weeks later, it was being called a $40,000 guitar.

Kurt Russell felt awful. His eyes welled up with tears immediately. When they relayed the news to the Martin Guitar Museum, they had just mentioned that there had been an “accident.” They played it cool to the cast and crew. Martin even offered to send another guitar. But what they didn’t know was how deliberately and violently this priceless museum piece had been smashed – they never knew that until they saw the movie. They did ask for the broken pieces back, so they could display them in the museum. Dick Boak, who runs the Martin Museum, said “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. 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. As a result of the incident, the company will no longer loan guitars to movies under any circumstances.”

So what you’re seeing in the film is the actual take – the actual destruction of this priceless museum guitar. If you visit the Martin Guitar Museum in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, you can see a lot of famous guitars: the acoustic that Kurt Cobain played on Nirvana’s legendary MTV Unplugged performance, a guitar owned and played by Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and multiple other famous musicians. And then you can see, resting in a guitar case, a smashed up acoustic guitar that used to be valuable for being an 1860s early model. But now known for a completely different reason – a film relic with an incredible, if not tragic, story.

Jennifer Jason Leigh wasn’t responsible, but felt responsible. She had really connected with the instrument and loved it. As a wrap gift, Tarantino wanted her to have something special to take her mind off of the mishap. It wasn’t a 145-year old Martin, but it was close. She opened her gift from the Director to find a rare 1880s Martin guitar – still very valuable and this time all hers to keep and protect. The Internet Says it’s True.