Jack Durgin is twenty-six, carrying $120,000 in cash, and producing a Coca-Cola commercial outside Rome. The job is supposed to be simple: a sixty-second spot at a train crossing, big budget, then home.
Coming July 1, 2026
Lights, Camera, Roma
Love and Power in Italy’s Greatest Film Dynasty
Mad Men meets Roman Holiday — with a suitcase full of cash and something about to go wrong.
Leonardo da Vinci Airport, 1981 — the job begins before Rome is awake.
Then Valentina walks into the casting session. She rides a dented Fiat through Rome’s back streets, cooks dinner on a rooftop in Parioli, drives him to Viterbo like nothing can touch them — and she happens to be the secret heir to one of Italy’s most powerful families.
Set in Rome in 1981, Lights, Camera, Roma is a story of desire, power, and what it costs to choose love inside a system designed to prevent it.
A private rooftop dinner in Rome — he is inside the moment; she is already somewhere else.
Written by the producer who carried the cash.
The Real 1981 Coca-Cola Commercial
This is the actual 1981 Coca-Cola commercial Jeff Nelson produced outside Rome — the real-life shoot that helped inspire Lights, Camera, Roma.
The Michelob Light Commercial from Chapter One
Before Rome
The first scene of Lights, Camera, Roma takes place high in the Rocky Mountains at Keystone, Colorado. Jack Durgin is twenty-six years old, producing a Michelob Light commercial with helicopters, professional skiers, and a crew racing the weather. It's December 1980. John Lennon has just been killed. Rome—and everything that will follow—is still months away.
The commercial below is the actual Michelob Light spot that inspired the opening chapter of the novel.