Attorney-turned-director Susan Saladoff’s first film, “Hot Coffee,” is an ambitious documentary. It not only aims to teach the viewers about the complicated ways in which corporate interests have been dismantling the civil justice system; it also takes head-on the myth of Stella Liebeck, whose lawsuit against McDonald’s is perhaps the most well-known suit in the history of America’s civil courts, as well as the larger misconceptions about plaintiff abuse of the civil justice system. It is far more difficult to change the mind of an audience that has already established a point of view, and there is hardly an American left without an opinion on the McDonald’s coffee case. “Hot Coffee” challenges these conclusions by exposing the falsehoods on which they are based, and forces viewers to take a hard look at the ways in which the American public has been tricked into giving away the right to a fair and accessible civil justice system.
At the question-and-answer session following the New York premiere of her film, Saladoff admitted that, when she first drafted an outline of her documentary, she strongly considered leaving out Liebeck’s story. In the end, however, Saladoff decided to take the opposite route, naming the film after Liebeck’s case and highlighting it as her first of four case studies of the ways in which corporate America has waged its campaign to limit access to civil remedies. For Saladoff, taking aim at the myths surrounding Liebeck’s case made the project feel particularly important. Saladoff, a former personal injury lawyer, explained that lawyers who represent injured people are “haunted in the courthouse by the McDonald’s case.” Indeed, despite her own convictions about the case, Saladoff admits that she found herself from time to time trying to distinguish her own cases from Liebeck’s case in jury voir dire, lest jurors think her clients were just opportunists taking advantage of the civil courts.
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