Eva Longoria discusses new movie ‘Flamin’ Hot’ at the Dallas Angelika

Texas native Eva Longoria had quite a busy Wednesday night in the D-FW area.

After tossing the first pitch at the Texas Rangers game, she rushed to the Dallas Angelika Film Center for an early screening of her feature-film directorial debut Flamin’ Hot.

The movie tells the story of Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia) who rose from Frito-Lay janitor to company executive after he allegedly had the idea for “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

Longoria joined Jesse Garcia and Annie Gonzalez, the movie’s leading stars, onstage after the screening and answered questions from a moderator and the audience. They were later joined by Richard Montañez, who attended the screening with his wife Judy.

“It’s our story, it’s your story, it’s your grandpa’s story, your dad’s story,” Richard Montañez said. “The way these two actors [Garcia and Gonzalez] brought it out, it’s amazing. We relived our youth.”

Shot with a majority-Latino cast and crew, the film is important for the Mexican-American community, Longoria said. But directing a movie with a Mexican-American protagonist, she said, comes with a lot of pressure.

“Hollywood gets to define what heroes look like and they never, they never look like us,” Longoria said. “We felt the pressure to get it right … for our community as a whole, for every Mexican American who doesn’t see themselves on screen.”

The movie was personal for Longoria in another way. She said she grew up eating “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos” in Corpus Christi.

“I remember the first time I had a regular bag of Cheetos, I thought something was wrong with my bag,” she said. “I thought all Cheetos were hot.”

The movie tells a fictional account of Montañez’s life, from a young boy of the 1960s in the outskirts of Los Angeles to a janitor at a Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. After many years, so the movie goes, Montañez pitches “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos” to PepsiCo Inc. CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub) over the phone and lands the product on shelves. Montañez then rises through the ranks, ultimately becoming a top marketing executive at Frito-Lay.

That makes for a great Hollywood story, but a 2021 report by The Los Angeles Times shows a different version of events.

“Flamin’ Hots were created by a team of hotshot snack food professionals starting in 1989, in the corporate offices of Frito-Lay’s headquarters in Plano, Texas,” The Times wrote. “The new product was designed to compete with spicy snacks sold in the inner-city mini-marts of the Midwest.”

In 1990, the product launched in several test markets: Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Houston. By 1992, Flamin’ Hot products were released across the country and eventually became a huge success.

But Longoria told The Times this year that the newspaper’s story never affected her.

“We never set out to tell the history of the Cheeto,” she said. “We are telling Richard Montañez’s story and we’re telling his truth.”

The movie comes out Friday on Hulu and Disney+.