But despite the numerous and varied offers Ridley received to move to bigger, more prestigious jobs—often via people he had successfully mentored into those positions—he turned them down again and again. He loved Nashville, and shunned the spotlight—at least for himself.

“I couldn’t imagine that anyone that gifted as a writer and editor would be that humble,” Tracy Moore, a former staff editor and reporter at the Scene, remembered. “And it’s not just that Ridley never met a compliment he couldn’t back away from, muttering in protest. It’s that he took my ideas seriously and helped shape them with respect and enthusiasm, even when they were too broad, or too unwieldy, or too green.”

One of the few times I remember seeing Ridley really struggle with a piece of writing, he wouldn’t tell me what it was. He shrugged it off and, typical of Ridley, shifted the focus to my own life. How were my kids? How was my wife’s job going? Many months later, I pieced together that “something” was one of the most piercing film essays I’ve ever read—a gorgeous rumination on Jacques Demy’s 1964 movie musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, for the Criterion Collection.

Most writers I know would have seen that gig as a breakthrough—a cinephile’s dream. But Ridley didn’t even tell me the essay had been published. Contrast that with the time I had an op-ed appear in the Times, which Ridley emailed to everyone in the Scene offices (where I no longer worked) and posted from every social media account he had a password for, as best I could tell.

Courtesy of Steve Haruch

“Ridley was quick with praise and—astonishingly to me even now—more than willing to give me plum assignments that he easily could’ve kept for himself, at a time when frankly I wasn’t that good of a writer,” said Noel Murray, who contributed to the Scene for a decade.

“The thing I do remember from Jim is utter selflessness,” said the Village Voice film critic Bilge Ebiri, a frequent contributor to the Scene film section over the years. “Always, always, always giving credit to other people. And always encouraging. ‘I knew you were the right guy to write this piece,’ is something he liked to say. And it never sounded like bullshit, or just a nice guy being nice.”

Saying Ridley was a nice guy is kind of like saying Wes Anderson has an interest in art direction. It’s a colossal understatement. The brass at SouthComm, the company that purchased the Scene from Village Voice Media in 2009, almost decided against promoting Ridley to editor in chief because they worried he was too nice. But he was tough where it counted. “He kicked me in the butt when I really needed a good butt-kicking,” Murray told me. And he never swerved from what he believed in—his family, his city, his newsroom, and his mentorship of people with the hope that he’d be eclipsed by them someday.