49 Fun Facts About Fried Green Tomatoes

What battle cry does Evelyn Couch shout as she rams the car that stole her parking space?

Towanda is the fearless alter ego Idgie adopts in Ninny's stories. Evelyn borrows the name, and when two young women take her space she rams their car six times.

What did Fannie Flagg add at the end of her novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe?

The café's recipes close the book, presented as Sipsey's own, fried green tomatoes included. Six years later Flagg turned them into a full Whistle Stop cookbook.

Before writing novels, Fannie Flagg was best known as a frequent panelist on which 1970s TV show?

Match Game had her writing answers on cards, though undiagnosed dyslexia made her doubt for years that she could be a writer. She usually sat bottom right, beside Richard Dawson.

Fannie Flagg chose a stage name because her birth name already belonged to which Oscar-winning actress?

Patricia Neal, who won her Oscar for Hud, was already on the books at Actors' Equity, so the young actress from Birmingham had to register under a new name and became Fannie Flagg.

The fictional Whistle Stop Cafe was loosely based on a real cafe in which Alabama suburb?

Irondale, just east of Birmingham, is where Flagg's great-aunt Bess ran a small café beside the railroad tracks. Bess was the model for Idgie.

In Fannie Flagg's novel, the mysterious 'Railroad Bill' is a Depression-era outlaw known for doing what?

Throwing food off trains: the 'outlaw' tosses government food and coal from supply trains by night for hungry families to find, and the novel lets on that it is Idgie in disguise.

Which fellow Southern novelist praised Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, calling Idgie Threadgoode 'a true original'?

Harper Lee wrote that airplanes and television had swept families like the Threadgoodes from the South and that Flagg had preserved them. She added that Huckleberry Finn would have tried to marry Idgie.

Jon Avnet made his feature directing debut with Fried Green Tomatoes after producing which Tom Cruise hit?

Risky Business made Avnet's name as a producer eight years earlier. On his own debut he also worked on the script for years, but a Writers Guild ruling left his name off the writing credits.

Which TV producer's company, Act III Communications, put up the seed money to develop Fried Green Tomatoes?

Norman Lear's company paid for a first screenplay, and he stayed on as an executive producer. Three decades later he signed on to produce a television version too.

Who plays Evelyn Couch, the timid 1980s housewife, in Fried Green Tomatoes?

Kathy Bates had just won the Best Actress Oscar for Misery. Her Evelyn starts out as a doormat and, fired up by an old woman's stories, begins standing up to everyone, her husband included.

Which actress plays Ninny Threadgoode, the storyteller in the nursing home?

Jessica Tandy earned an Oscar nomination for the part. Her Ninny insists she is only in the home to keep a friend company, then spins the Whistle Stop stories for a stranger in the lounge.

Who plays the tomboy Idgie Threadgoode?

Mary Stuart Masterson's Idgie refuses to stop serving Black customers at the café when the sheriff warns her off, and gives the same welcome to the hobos who pass through.

Which young actor plays Idgie's adored older brother Buddy in Fried Green Tomatoes?

Chris O'Donnell won the part after working with Jon Avnet a year earlier on his very first film. His Buddy is the one person young Idgie will listen to.

Which veteran actress plays Sipsey, the Threadgoode family cook, in Fried Green Tomatoes?

Cicely Tyson's Sipsey cooks at the café beside her son Big George, and it is she who stops Frank Bennett when he comes to snatch Ruth's baby.

How does Buddy Threadgoode die?

Hit by a train, in front of Idgie and Ruth. Years later, when the trains stop running through Whistle Stop, the café closes and the town drifts away.

Ruth leaves Whistle Stop to marry the abusive Frank Bennett in which Georgia town?

Valdosta is where Idgie turns up with her brother Julian and Big George to bring the pregnant Ruth home, warning Frank that she will kill him if he ever touches Ruth again.

Who gives Idgie the money to open the café?

Papa Threadgoode hands over the money so that Idgie can start a business and support Ruth and her newborn son.

What happens to Frank Bennett's body after Sipsey kills him?

It is barbecued and served to the Georgia detective hunting for Frank, who clears several plates and leaves none the wiser.

Who gives false alibi testimony at the murder trial that clears Idgie and Big George?

Reverend Scroggins swears they were at his revival all weekend. Only afterwards does Idgie learn that the 'Bible' he swore on was a copy of Moby-Dick.

What is Ruth's nickname for Idgie, signed on the card left at Ruth's grave?

The Bee Charmer: the fresh card on Ruth's grave is signed with it, which tells Evelyn that Idgie is still alive.

Which small Georgia town stood in for Whistle Stop when Fried Green Tomatoes was filmed?

Juliette gained a real Whistle Stop Café out of it: once the crew had gone, the building's owner and a friend turned the film's set into a working restaurant.

In the film Fried Green Tomatoes, which of her husband's relatives is Evelyn visiting when she meets Ninny?

His aunt, who throws Evelyn out of her room, which is how Evelyn ends up in the lounge beside a talkative stranger. In the novel the relative is Ed's mother.

Made for about $11 million, Fried Green Tomatoes took in roughly how much at cinemas worldwide?

$120 million, near enough, $82 million of it in North America. When surveys showed younger audiences turning up, Universal recut the ads around Idgie and Ruth.

In Idgie's tall tale, what carries off the frozen lake that once lay beside Whistle Stop?

A flock of ducks: in Idgie's telling they landed one November, the lake froze around them, and they flew off and took it with them.

Fried Green Tomatoes earned Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress and which other category?

Best Adapted Screenplay: Fannie Flagg was nominated for adapting her own novel, with Carol Sobieski, who had died a year before the film opened. The Oscar eluded them, but the script won the USC Scripter Award.

Though it only hints at Idgie and Ruth's romance, Fried Green Tomatoes won a 1992 award from which group?

GLAAD praised its rendering of intimacy between women. In Fannie Flagg's novel the two are more plainly a couple than they are on screen.

On the DVD commentary for Fried Green Tomatoes, how does Jon Avnet describe Idgie and Ruth's food fight?

A love scene: that is Avnet's reading of a film that never states the romance outright, though Fannie Flagg's novel leaves little doubt about the two women.

Who composed the original score for Fried Green Tomatoes?

Thomas Newman wrote it, and Jon Avnet hired him again for The War and Red Corner. It was an early credit for the composer of The Shawshank Redemption and Finding Nemo.

Grayson Hugh's end-title song for Fried Green Tomatoes, 'I'll Remember You', was written by which songwriter?

Bob Dylan recorded it in 1985 for Empire Burlesque, an album mixed by Arthur Baker. Baker went on to supervise this film's music and reworked the song with Hugh.

Which singer revives a 1930s Lucille Bogan blues number on the Fried Green Tomatoes soundtrack?

Patti LaBelle sings it. Bogan had cut the song under the name Bessie Jackson, which she apparently adopted to conceal her identity; it is the name in the film's credits.

Which British singer covers 'What Becomes of the Brokenhearted' on the Fried Green Tomatoes soundtrack?

Paul Young took it to No. 22 in America in 1992. The song had been written for the Spinners, until Jimmy Ruffin persuaded its writers to let him record it first.

Which country star was attached in 2020 to play a present-day Idgie in an NBC series of Fried Green Tomatoes?

Reba McEntire was to play a modern-day Idgie coming home to Whistle Stop. A year later she said the project 'just kind of went away'.

Which future Justified regular plays Ruth's violent husband Frank Bennett in Fried Green Tomatoes?

Nick Searcy went on to play Chief Deputy Art Mullen. His Frank first rides into Whistle Stop with the Ku Klux Klan to attack Big George, before coming back alone.

What does Evelyn find when she drives to Whistle Stop at the end of Fried Green Tomatoes?

Ninny by her demolished house: it had been condemned and torn down while she was away keeping a friend company, and nobody had dared to tell her.

Inspired by Ninny's stories, Evelyn Couch starts a new career selling for which company?

Mary Kay Cosmetics: under Ninny's influence Evelyn takes up work outside the home, and begins exercising and eating better too.

In the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, what nickname does Buddy Jr. get after losing an arm?

Stump grows up to pass his guardians' stories on to his own daughter and granddaughter, keeping Whistle Stop alive after the town itself has gone.

Parts of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe are told through a fictional town newsletter called what?

The Weems Weekly is Dot Weems's bulletin, where town news comes with jokes at her husband Wilbur's expense. Its last issue, in 1969, is headed 'Hard to Say Goodbye', as the couple leave the dying town.

Fannie Flagg's 2020 sequel, The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop, follows which grown-up character back to the town?

Ruth's son Bud takes one last trip to see what has become of the ghost town where his mother and Idgie raised him.

After wrecking their car, Evelyn Couch tells two younger women that she is older and has more what?

Insurance: the pair had taken her parking space with the taunt that they were younger and faster, and she turned the line back on them.

Carol Sobieski, the first writer hired to adapt Fried Green Tomatoes, had scripted which 1982 movie musical?

Annie. Sobieski died in November 1990, months before filming began, and the screen credit she shares with Fannie Flagg was settled by a Writers Guild arbitration.

Which illness takes Ruth's life soon after the murder trial in Fried Green Tomatoes?

Cancer. The novel is starker than the film here: Onzell, who is nursing Ruth, ends her suffering with an overdose of morphine.

Who does Ninny Threadgoode say she married when she first meets Evelyn?

Cleo Threadgoode, Idgie's brother: Ninny says the family practically adopted her. The line sits awkwardly beside the film's closing hint that Ninny is Idgie herself.

Idgie Threadgoode's nickname is short for which given name?

Imogene Louise, in full. In the novel she announces at ten or eleven that she will never wear a dress again, and changes into her brother Buddy's old trousers.

With what does Sipsey strike the blow that kills Frank Bennett in Fried Green Tomatoes?

A cast-iron skillet: the family cook reaches for the tool of her trade, and Ninny keeps the secret until the very end of her story.

Fried Green Tomatoes author Fannie Flagg has a small acting role in which 1978 movie musical?

Grease casts her as Nurse Wilkins. That same year she won a short-story prize at a Santa Barbara writers' conference, and the story grew into her first novel.

Which actress plays Ruth Jamison, Idgie's closest companion, in Fried Green Tomatoes?

Mary-Louise Parker's Ruth walks out on a violent husband while pregnant, then helps Idgie open the café and raises her son there.

Fannie Flagg first reached national television as a staff writer on which 1960s show?

Candid Camera hired her soon after she sold sketch material to a New York nightclub revue, and she went on to work in front of its lens as well as behind it.

Fried Green Tomatoes opened on just five screens; what did Universal credit for its success?

Word of mouth, the studio said: reviews were mixed, yet in almost every city the second week outsold the first, and the run grew to more than 1,200 screens.

Where do Idgie and her brother Julian run a roadside stand at the end of Fannie Flagg's novel?

Florida: a family driving through stops at the stand and meets a white-haired old woman with all the sharp wit and open-handedness the café's regulars once knew.