Scene Editor Jim Ridley Dies at 50

Jim Ridley — the editor, heart and soul of the Nashville Scene, a film critic with few peers, and one of the most beloved and respected journalists the city has known — died today around noon at St. Thomas Midtown Hospital. He had collapsed after suffering a cardiac event in the Scene offices on March 28, and never regained consciousness. He was 50 years old.

He was born James Allison Ridley V on July 23, 1965, to a prominent Murfreesboro family. A passion for the arts was hardwired in his DNA — his father, James Allison Ridley IV, and late mother, Polly Dillon Ridley, were founders of the Murfreesboro Little Theatre, and his brother, Read Ridley, is a filmmaker and the director of Columbia State Community College’s Film Crew Technology program.

Ridley attended Vanderbilt University as a freshman for what he once described as “one glorious and study-free year,” though while there he worked at honing the craft that would become his livelihood — writing film and record reviews for two Vandy publications, The Hustler newspaper and Versus magazine. He completed his studies at Middle Tennessee State University, where he graduated in 1989 with a B.A. in mass communications while also completing an English major. He also wrote for the seminal fanzine Nashville Intelligence Report and Fireplace Whiskey Journal.

But his journalism career actually began years earlier. At 13, he started contributing reviews to The Tennessean’s book page. In an April 1, 1979, review of James Conaway’s novel World’s End, Ridley wrote, “The prose clumps along like a centipede with broken legs, and the story is presented episodically, something like a cross between The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight and Fools Die, with none of Breslin’s wit or Puzo’s spellbinding storytelling.” Six months later — three months after his 14th birthday — he offered this assessment of Mary Stewart’s Arthurian saga The Last Enchantment: “Stewart’s Merlin is made out to be an obnoxious, persnickety fool, and he speaks like a combination of the worst elements of John Cheever, a used-car salesman and Abigail Van Buren. The legend was treated with more respect by Monty Python. Throw this one to the dragon.” This at an age when his peers were likely spending afternoons watching Gilligan’s Island reruns and falling off skateboards.

Ridley’s career really took hold in 1989, when he made a pitch to Brian Mansfield, then the entertainment editor for fledgling alt-weekly the Nashville Scene. Jim wanted to be the paper’s film critic, and he concluded his letter with a line that became legend in the Scene edit room: “Remember,” the 23-year-old wrote, “Gene Shalit is a disease, and we are the cure.” In no time, he began contributing reviews on a regular basis.

In 1993, Ridley married the love of his life, artist and graphic designer Alicia Adkerson, whom he’d known since his high school days. A few years later they started a family. Their daughter Kat is now 14, and son Jamie is 11.

As circulation expanded, Ridley joined the Scene full time, quickly establishing himself as one of the most respected film critics in the business. Pick a Ridley review at random and you’ll likely find a highly quotable study aid for any film criticism course. This excerpt, from a piece reflecting on the legacy of Sergio Leone’s epic Once Upon a Time in the West, is a great example of the Ridley magic — a combination of insight, profound passion, lyrical splendor and an eye for detail:

Over the years, I’ve found something more to appreciate every time I’ve seen Once Upon a Time in the West. But every time, it leaves me feeling like an awestruck 10-year-old. It has something to do with the scale of Leone’s gloriously excessive 1968 Western. Every dusty street is a football field’s width. Every grizzled face, shot in screen-filling close-up, looms like a head on Mount Rushmore. Every gunfight is a duel of the gods. A viewer becomes an HO-scale brakeman walking through a regular-sized trainyard. In this, the most elaborate and exhilarating of his grandiose pistol operas, Leone took the Western he envisioned as a child — an Old West of quick-triggered warriors, enormous open spaces and superheroic deeds — and transferred it to the screen with its mythic distortions intact. 

It was that sort of writing that earned Ridley first-place awards in arts criticism from the Association for Alternative Newsmedia in 2006 and 2010.

Bruce Dobie, a former co-owner of the Scene and the paper’s editor from 1989 to 2004, remembers being astounded by Ridley’s uncanny way with words. “There were so many gifted writers when I edited the Scene,” Dobie says, “but at the top of the heap, in terms of outright command of the English language, was Jim. I’ve never seen anyone who could perform such verbal acrobatics. On more than one occasion, I would be having trouble coming up with a headline for a story and I'd ask Jim for help. In five minutes there'd be an email from him with not two or three possible headlines, but 15 to 20 of them, all utterly brilliant. It was scary, like having Shakespeare one cubicle over. He could just turn it on, let it flow.”

After a stint as managing editor under editor Pete Kotz, Ridley took the helm of the Scene as editor in 2009, when SouthComm purchased the paper from Village Voice Media.

Even beyond the accolades won under his own name, it’s the slew of AAN awards won by other Scene writers under Ridley (40 in all) that is the true testament to his brilliance — nearly all nurtured by Ridley’s counsel, encouragement and, most of all, tireless editing. No Scene staffer would dispute that he was far and away the most gifted writer this paper ever had. And that translated to his editing skills.

“The mark of a truly great editor is not only that they make things better, but also that they’re invisible,” says Steve Cavendish, former Scene news editor and current editor of the Washington City Paper, another SouthComm publication. “I lost track of the number of writers who said, ‘Ridley improved my piece,’ and yet it was almost never Jim’s voice that came through in those stories; it was always the writer’s. That is unbelievably rare. And when, inevitably, you would thank him for spinning some convoluted thing you wrote into gold, he would always play it off like it was no big deal, because he hated getting compliments anyway. He made every single journalist around him better.”

But Ridley wasn’t above inserting a quip or two of his own if it enlivened the proceedings. When I wrote a story in 2007 about the late Frank Dileo, a larger-than-life music exec and Michael Jackson’s onetime manager, the line that earned me the most praise — “Jackson may look naive, but when it comes to business, he’s no chimp-cuddling moonbeam” — was a classic Ridley tweak. If only I’d written it myself, I might not have felt so awkward accepting the kudos. And I’ve heard from many other writers who had similar experiences over the years.

“Jim Ridley was one of the best alt-weekly editors in the country,” says Chris Ferrell, president and CEO of SouthComm. “He understood the multifaceted culture of Nashville better than anyone I know, and could tell a story about anything that would draw the reader in. Even before he was the editor, Jim was the heart and soul of the Scene. My only concern about naming Jim editor in 2009 was whether he was too nice for the job. But I quickly learned that Jim didn’t have to be tough, because his whole staff wanted to make him happy by doing their best. He inspired them and coached them. They wanted to deliver for the Scene because they respected Jim and loved him and didn’t want to let him down.”

Ridley’s journalistic gifts were recognized a year ago this month, when he was enshrined on the MTSU College of Mass Communication’s Wall of Fame.

But as devoted as he was to the Scene, Ridley was just as tireless and enthusiastic in his de facto role as an ambassador for the city he so loved.

“Years before Nashville was hip, Jim showed readers all the hidden treasures the city had to offer,” says Galyn Glick Martin, a former Scene staffer, current program coordinator at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and longtime family friend. “He celebrated up-and-coming filmmakers, writers, chefs, musicians and artists who would go on to make the city a better and more interesting place to live.

“Jim was open and enthusiastic, curious about everything and everyone. He was genuinely interested in people, which is probably one of the reasons he was so well loved. On Facebook, my mom posted that he made women feel so pretty, they had to check the mirror and see what changed. I know several men who counted him as their closest friend, and many others who looked up to him as a mentor. He was exuberant, joyful and silly (sometimes I think he was underestimated because of that), but he had so much depth. He wasn’t a cute, fluffy teddy bear of a guy with stuffing for brains.”

One of the greatest measures of Ridley’s impact on the city he loved can be seen at the corner of Belcourt and 21st avenues: The Belcourt Theatre, one of the most revered arthouses in the country, currently undergoing a $5 million renovation.

“I counted Jim as one of the main forces for allowing The Belcourt to be The Belcourt,” says Stephanie Silverman, the theater’s executive director. “His enthusiasm and his understanding from the get-go, from 1999 and before, when he was writing editorials about what the theater could be, were essential. He innately understood what a great film space could do in a city, and that Nashville was a great city for that to happen.”

And Ridley wasn’t just generous with his ink, but with his time. “He did a session for our high school seminar last summer that I’ll never forget,” Silverman says. “There were a bunch of high school kids watching a movie in the theater and talking with Jim about it for three hours — it was part of the Altman series — and then he came out into the lobby, and for the next hour, maybe hour-and-a-half, Jim is just standing in the lobby with this same group of kids, and they don’t want to leave him. And those kids were so excited, and so engaged in this great conversation with someone who had so much joy and love for this discipline. It was just remarkable.

“I see our colleagues across the country struggle in ways that we don’t have to struggle, and I think a lot of the reason is that we got regular love in the paper from Jim. And by love, I don’t even necessarily mean ‘love,’ per se — we got our share of negative reviews from Jim for films we were showing — but at least there was a conversation about it. And that critical voice, and caring about that critical voice, is something that allowed us to flourish, and allowed the community to engage in a conversation with us, instead of being just another theater throwing something on the screen. I think it’s fair to say the renovation project might not be happening if not for Jim. ”

It was Ridley’s giving spirit — with his time, his money, and most of all, his encouragement and praise — that was his most remarkable trait. No matter how much work he had on his plate before calling it quits for the night, he’d patiently sit and talk with writers, salespeople or Nashvillians who stopped in to promote this or that event or cause, never rushing them out the door. All the while he’d make you feel like the most important person in the room. He frequently put other people’s thoughts, feelings, concerns and needs before his own, sometimes to a fault.

That phenomenon was most notable during that most dreaded of all moments in an editor’s existence: the irate phone call from someone who had been the subject of less-than-flattering copy in the Scene’s pages, whether a politician, business owner, musician or restaurateur. We would sit in awe — uncomfortable awe, but awe nonetheless — as we overheard Ridley in his office, calmly and compassionately talking the person down or letting them blow off steam, sometimes for as long as 30 minutes.

It’s a quality former Scene editor Liz Garrigan — now working in Paris as senior editor at Worldcrunch — knows well. "Jim Ridley was probably the only newspaper editor in history without a single enemy, and I can think of no other person, living or dead, who could possibly pull off such a feat. He was uniquely brilliant with a boundless talent that more than once made me wonder why he didn't seek more cachet or higher-paying jobs elsewhere. But his greatest attributes were his unique kindness, humility and noble unwillingness to put expediency, or anything else for that matter, above human decency and love."

Perhaps Jim’s spirit can best be described in an experience that my then-fiancée Wendy had shortly after I told Ridley we’d be getting married. In her words: “I encountered Jim in our break room; he exaggeratedly mimed ‘hang on’ and then looked out the break room door, first left and then right, and as I wondered what in the world he was about to do, Jim picked me up and spun me around in a big bear hug (feet off the ground!), about three turns. I felt like I was in a real-life musical. And somehow, knowing him, it just seemed natural, and we carried on with our day as if nothing magical had happened.” Two weeks later, Jim was there with us as we tied the knot, surrounded by a small gathering of friends. He was beaming the whole time, looking dapper in his suit.

Most of all, I’ll remember Jim sitting in his office, his loud cackling laugh resonating through the halls as he formulated a pun so awful that he’d be sheepishly proud, or pecking away at the keyboard with his two index fingers, or peering out through the physics-defying Jenga towers of books, CDs and mail rising up from his desk, or talking in that affectionate, downright mushy voice he’d get when on the phone with Alicia or Kat or Jamie.

It’s hard to think of another person more beloved, revered or admired around here. His death leaves a cavernous hole in the lives of those closest to him, not to mention greater Nashville. It’s hard to imagine this city without him.

Services are planned for Saturday, April 16, at Woodfin Funeral Chapel in Murfreesboro First Baptist Church, 200 East Main St. in Murfreesboro. Visitation will be 9 to 11 a.m. with services to follow. A GoFundMe account has been set up to cover medical expenses, funeral expenses and to support his family. 

Jack Silverman joined the Nashville Scene in 1997 and eventually became managing editor before leaving in 2014. He still freelances for the paper.