The Guru | |
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Directed by | James Ivory |
Written by | Ruth Prawer Jhabvala James Ivory |
Produced by | Ismail Merchant |
Starring | Rita Tushingham Michael York Utpal Dutt Madhur Jaffrey Barry Foster Aparna Sen Zohra Sehgal Saeed Jaffrey |
Cinematography | Subrata Mitra |
Edited by | Prabhakar Supare Humphrey Dixon (assistant) |
Music by | Ustad Vilayat Khan |
Production company | |
Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release date |
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Running time | 112 min |
Countries | United States India |
Languages | English Urdu |
Budget | $970,000[1] |
The Guru is a 1969 film by Merchant Ivory Productions, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory.
A rock star, Tom Pickle (Michael York), travels to India to learn to play the sitar with the great musician Ustad Zafar Khan (as George Harrison did when he studied under Ravi Shankar). Khan (Utpal Dutt) is not happy with his disciple but still takes him to Benares to meet his own guru.
According to Fox records, the film required $1,675,000 in theatrical rentals to break even. By December 1970, it had only made $625,000 in rentals, causing the studio to take a loss.[2] This was equivalent to estimated box office gross receipts of approximately $2 million.[3]