A Chautauqua County native has returned home this week for the Western New York premier of his first-big budget film credit in Hollywood.

Jesse Stratton will be at the Reg Lenna Center for the Arts on Friday when “37: A Final Promise,” which he co-wrote with director and lead actor Randall Batinkoff, will screen at 8 p.m.

Since long before his graduation from Westfield Academy and Central School District in 1995, Stratton has had aspirations of making and acting in films. After meeting with Wes Cardino, another Westfield native, in 1996, the two began making independent films throughout the next few years in Westfield and Fredonia before Stratton joined a screenwriters’ guild in Chicago, where he lived for a decade.

It wasn’t until Stratton’s involvement with “37: A Final Promise,” however, that he got his big break.

“In terms of budget and visibility, this is my first real credit on a feature of any note,” Stratton said. “And, though the film is new to the world, it’s something we’ve lived with for several years now.”

The film follows a tortured rock star at a crossroads in his life as he finds new love while grappling with a dark secret. It is the film adaptation of the book “How Angels Die,” written by Guy Blews, which is based largely on actual events. Stratton said the original script was rather bland, as it was tied too closely to the book-based narrative.

Cardino, who served as director of photography for the film, had met with the film’s producer while working together on a previous project and recommended Stratton when it became apparent that a “page one rewrite” was necessary in order to bring more life to to the film version of the story.

“The book is currently about to be published next month, so the source material (for the film) was this unpublished book and the screenplay that they had generated had been through about six or seven drafts,” Stratton said. “I told them that, even though these events really happened, they wouldn’t work well when transitioning to the screen. So they basically handed (the screenplay) over to me and I had to make a movie out of their script.”

“The way I saw it, we could get good reviews and make some money by doing a horror movie as opposed to this closed character study that comes off as more of a melodrama,” he added. “But we weren’t trying to make a blockbuster action film. We wanted to talk about real human emotion and let it speak to the people who were open to that. And, largely, those people have said they thought it was beautiful.”

Stratton said the rewrite he did essentially stripped away everything that had been previously produced by Batinkoff and Blews, aside from character names, and rebuilt the script from the ground up using the framework laid down by the book. One of the more glaring changes Stratton introduced to the story was the use of supernatural elements, for which he said he drew upon his past knowledge and experiences gleaned from occasional visits to Lily Dale.

“There’s one scene I wrote that includes a psychic, played by Bruce Davidson, who appears in the film twice,” he said. “So, having grown up right next to the biggest spiritual community in America, I got to draw on some of my Western New York experience while creating this incredibly authentic psychic reading.”

The film has previously premiered for a week in Los Angeles and a week in New York City, and has been available on video on demand streaming sites for the past month-and-a-half. Stratton said it has received a largely favorable response, and has been the subject of wild coincidence in the sense that it incorporates human health issues such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and suicide while released at a time where those topics had resurfaced as top news stories in mainstream media over the past two months.

Stratton said Friday’s screening at the Reg Lenna came about through the assistance of Chris Switala, a board member and family friend of Stratton’s. Stratton said he is grateful for the opportunity to return to Chautauqua County to show a Hollywood film that he was instrumental in creating.

“This is kind of one of the things on my bucket list, to come back to Westfield and the Western New York area and show people the result of our hard work (on the film),” he said. “And everyone has always been very supportive of both myself and Wes’s journey (to Hollywood). This has always been a place where people have believed in us, so it’s kind of special to bring (the film) to this community and show it.”

The Friday screening will begin at 8 p.m., and tickets are $5 each. The tickets may be purchased from the Reg Lenna box office beginning one hour before show time, at 7 p.m. Following the screening of the film, which runs 94 minutes, Stratton will hold a question-and-answer session with the audience.

For more information, visit www.reglenna.com/events/movies-reg-37-final-promise.