OFF SEASON

Once it was a little bit of paradise. Now the Coconut Grotto Hotel is a crumbling waste of pastel stucco. That is until it serves as unlikely refuge for a guest whose past is mystery, whose identity is a secret, and whose presence gives everyone a chance to believe in the impossible.

In season, this jet-set Florida hotel is hard enough to maintain. Off season, it’s a foreclosure waiting to happen. That’s not good news for loveless, aspiring lounge singer, Patty Winslow (Golden Globe-nominee Sherilyn Fenn, Twin Peaks). The only perk is a rent-free room for her and Jackson (Rory Culkin, You Can Count on Me), her orphaned nephew entrusted to her care. A wildly imaginative boy with a penchant for fantasy and escape, Jackson zeroes in on a new target: Sam Clausner (Oscar & Golden Globe-nominee and Emmy-winner Hume Cronyn, To Dance with the White Dog), a secretive guest who has chosen the hotel for his own personal escape. In a garish Hawaiian shirt and straw hat, the old and frail traveling salesman seems an unlikely target for Jackson’s latest, bizarre observation—that he’s Santa Claus, off season and on vacation.

So who’s Patty to argue, when Sam makes one of Jackson’s impossible wishes come true? Who’s complaining when news of the phenomenon hits the airwaves and the Coconut Grotto becomes the focus of a headline-making story? New guests are arriving by the busload, and each one of them wants to become part of the hotel’s blockbuster new publicity theme: Christmas in July. As if by magic, everyone’s wishes come true—even for the skeptical Patty who falls in love, and whose modest ambition finally plays to a packed house. Yet what’s she to make of the police officer shadowing a strange old con artist on the run? What can anyone believe when the odd little man vanishes off the face of the earth? The answer may truly be out of this world.