Flamin' Hot

The story as Richard Montañez tells it: a Mexican American working as a janitor at a Frito-Lay plant experiments with chilli in his kitchen, invents Flamin' Hot Cheetos and gets himself in front of the company's executives. The film is adapted from his 2013 memoir and builds his rise from janitor to executive as an American dream narrative. The problem: on 16 May 2021 the Los Angeles Times published a year-long investigation that found major discrepancies in the claim. According to the internal Frito-Lay inquiry the paper drew on, Montañez did not develop the product; Flamin' Hot was created and launched in the late 1980s by a team inside the company that included a woman named Lynne Greenfeld. That he rose from janitor to executive is true. The paper reported that Frito-Lay informed the producers of those findings in 2019 and that they proceeded anyway. Eva Longoria directed, her first feature. Jesse García plays Montañez. Difficult for anyone who cares about films that present themselves as true stories; the energy and the performances are good, but the origin of what it depicts is seriously disputed and the film never enters that dispute.