RECEPTION SWEET INDEED FOR ‘LORRAINE’ CREATOR

Don’t look for “Sweet Lorraine” in this summer’s list of super-hits. It hasn’t exactly set the movie world on fiscal fire, like “Beverly Hills Cop II” or “The Untouchables.” But its young producer-director, Steve Gomer, says he couldn’t be more pleased with the reception given “Sweet Lorraine,” an affectionately observed comedy about life in a has-been resort hotel along New York’s Borscht Belt.

The film, which ran eight weeks in Los Angeles earlier this summer, opened yesterday for a scheduled one-week engagement at United Artists’ South Coast Village complex in Costa Mesa. It’s the first time the film is being shown in Orange County.

A good reaction to a film is “not something anyone can really predict. . . . When it happens, it is as surprising as it is gratifying,” said Gomer, who was in Santa Ana Thursday night for a special screening of “Sweet Lorraine,” held by the American Jewish Committee’s Orange County chapter.

“So many studios were dubious about financing the project. It didn’t fit any of their formulas. It wasn’t a teen flick or anything else like that,” said Gomer, who ended up financing his film independently.

“It was risky, they said, because it was my first feature film and because it dealt so much with Jewish characterizations.

“Some people suggested ways to broaden the appeal, to make it more homogeneous, like shifting the hotel and characters from the Catskills to the Midwest.”

Obviously, Gomer resisted such suggestions, but he has also dismissed the notion that “Sweet Lorriane” belongs to “some kind of Jewish movie genre.”

“Sure, the situation and the people are of a specific time and place,” he said. “But we deal also with societal drift and loss, about rediscovering a sense of family and community. These are hardly subjects narrowed to only one segment of our society.”

“Sweet Lorraine,” anchored by Maureen Stapleton’s authoritative performance as the owner of the doomed Hotel Lorraine, has won generally favorable notices as an ingratiatingly peopled, nicely crafted and modestly scaled work.

Modest, too, is “Sweet Lorraine’s” national gross, $1 million as of this week. Its distributor, New York-based Angelika Films, however, maintained that this isn’t bad for a venture that cost a shoestring $800,000 and whose story line doesn’t fit any Hollywood genre craze.

The film is making the international festival circuit--last June in Jerusalem, later this month in Tokyo.

Even so, “Sweet Lorraine’s” sweetest achievement may well be a purely personal one.

It is not only the 34-year-old Gomer’s first big-screen feature movie, but also his autobiographical re-creation of Jewish community life as it flourished in the resort hotels of the Catskills.

Such lovingly detailed recall has led some critics, including Times reviewer Michael Wilmington, to liken “Sweet Lorraine” to the familial memoirs of Woody Allen and Neil Simon.

Actually, the small and tattered Hotel Lorraine is the pseudonym for the real-life Heiden Hotel, which Gomer’s family had operated since the turn of the century. Gomer spent his childhood summers at the family resort.

By the 1970s, though, he seemed to drift away from the Heiden. He was busy starting his New York stage career--first as a university theater arts major, then as assistant to artistic director Marshall W. Mason of the Circle Repertory, and later as an associate of director-actor Joseph Chaikin.

(Gomer has since filmed a documentary on Chaikin, a leading figure in experimental theater whose close encounter with death was the subject of “The Traveler,” the Jean-Claude van Itallie play staged earlier this year at the Mark Taper Forum.)

However, by the 1980s, Gomer found himself drawn back to the Heiden. When he married Jane Heiden, the granddaughter of the hotel’s founders, the wedding took place at the old hotel. And he decided on the Heiden as the subject--and hero--for his first try at feature movie-making.

“I had already started writing sketches of my memories there, especially of my grandfather, who was the Heiden’s salad chef,” he said.

“I became obsessed with the idea to make a movie about the place and the way of life it represented. Of course, the ideal thing was to shoot the film right at the Heiden.”

Another reason for doing the movie was that the Heiden itself was under the gun. “The family had put the hotel up for sale, and we knew that any new owners would for sure tear it down,” he recalled.

When new owners did take over in 1985, they agreed to hold off demolition until Gomer finished shooting that summer. The film ran into money problems, and Gomer won another reprieve--this time until summer 1986.

In early 1986, with financing finally in place, Gomer went back to Stapleton, who had first been approached two years earlier to play the hotel owner.

“She had always liked the role, but I don’t think she ever thought this young bunch of people could ever come up with the money. Frankly, I don’t think she ever expected to see me again,” he said.

Except for Stapleton and Lee Richardson, a veteran stage actor, the cast consisted of up-and-coming performers, including Trini Alvarado as Stapleton’s granddaughter young Molly, John Bedford Lloyd as Molly’s boyfriend and Freddie Roman as the Lorraine’s house comic.

On July 3, 1986, after 32 days of shooting at the Heiden, the “Sweet Lorraine” contingent gave themselves--and the hotel--a last-hurrah party. Four days later, the demolition crew went to work.