EXCLUSIVE: William Mundell’s Neurosphere Entertainment has acquired film and TV rights to The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America, historian Mae Ngai‘s work of nonfiction that tells a multigenerational story of trailblazers in the fight for Chinese American civil rights during the Chinese Exclusion era.
Neurosphere is developing the book as a historical drama spanning both feature film and limited series formats. Mundell will produce alongside Joseph Culp, who will pen scripts with Robyn Mundell.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, (now by Mariner Books/HarperCollins, in paperback by Princeton Press) The Lucky Ones centers on Joseph and Mary Tape, immigrants who defied systemic racism in 19th century San Francisco to demand equal rights for their children. When their daughter Mamie was denied entry to a local public school in 1884, the Tapes took their case to court — and won. The ruling in Tape v. Hurley affirmed birthright citizenship for children of Chinese immigrants, decades before Plessy v. Ferguson or Brown v. Board of Education would reshape American jurisprudence.
Neurosphere’s take on the material will focus on the Tape family’s legal battle for constitutional birthright citizenship and how the fully assimilated family was essentially on trial for its “American-ness” in a deeply racist period of U.S. history, in the spirit of To Kill a Mockingbird. The project will trace the Tape family’s journey from post-Gold Rush San Francisco and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, through the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the Jazz Age, and the pro-Chinese rallies during World War II, examining their legacy within the broader American tapestry.
“I am thrilled that Neurosphere will develop The Lucky Ones for the screen,” Ngai told Deadline. “It’s an amazing story of one family’s unexpected journey that contended with racism, exclusions, and the personal costs of ambition and striving.”
Said Mundell, “Tape v. Hurley is arguably the most important American civil rights case you’ve never heard of. Long before other communities fought their battles in court, a Chinese American family stood up to the state and changed the law. We believe this story—rooted in resilience, justice, and belonging—will resonate powerfully with contemporary audiences.”
A professor of history and Asian American studies at Columbia University, Ngai one of the nation’s preeminent scholars on immigration and citizenship. She is also the author of the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004), as well as Bancroft Prize-winner The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021), and is co-editor of Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice (2024).
Ngai is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, and a Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress. She also has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the NY Public Library, and the Russell Sage Foundation, among others. Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and The Nation. Before becoming a historian, she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea, based on the Laurence Stone Lectures at Princeton.
Neurosphere Entertainment is best known for its U.S.-China diplomacy doc Better Angels, directed by two-time Academy Award winner Malcolm Clarke, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Beijing Film Festival, as well as Gerrymandering, a documentary on the widely abused practice of drawing electoral districts to fix elections, directed by Oscar winner Jeff Reichert.
The Gotham Group brokered the rights deal on behalf of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
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