Garrett Scott, 37; Prize-Winning Filmmaker Made Two Documentaries

Garrett Scott was on his way to becoming an English professor when an unemployed plumber rampaged through the streets of suburban San Diego in a stolen Army tank.

Before that 1995 incident, Scott hadn’t thought about making documentaries. When he couldn’t shake the television image of the tank crashing into cars, he decided to try his hand at filmmaking and crafted the 2002 film, “Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story,” a bleak tale praised for its unorthodox style and insights into grass-roots attitudes about violence and war.

For his second documentary, Scott spent six weeks embedded with the 82nd Airborne Division fighting in Fallouja, Iraq, to make “Occupation: Dreamland.” The portrait of conflicted soldiers also received wide acclaim. Calling it an “excellent film,” The Times’ Kenneth Turan said it had “an intimate, personal quality” that reflected the filmmakers’ hard-earned bond with the soldiers.

When the 2005 film won the Truer Than Fiction Award at Saturday’s Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, his filmmaking partner, Ian Olds, dedicated it to Scott.

Scott, who lived in New York City, was visiting his family when he died March 2 of cardiac arrest while swimming in a public pool in Coronado, said his mother, Lynne. He was 37.

“Everybody who met him was struck by his unique and powerful mind,” said Olds, who edited both documentaries. “We talked about the idea of making films with a cold eye and a warm heart.”

Filmmaker magazine called the self-taught filmmaker’s style “one part subcultural talking head and two parts intellectual essay.”

When people asked, “Do you have to have a tank in every movie?” the pair would respond that the two films shared something more subtle -- the analysis of power.

At the time of his death, Scott was planning to film in Afghanistan and was working on a project about San Francisco city politics in the 1970s.

Scott was born Nov. 19, 1968, in Munich, Germany, into a U.S. military family. He grew up in Coronado and later earned a bachelor’s degree in English from UC Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in literature from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

After college, he returned to the San Diego area and was having doubts about an academic career when he watched the tank footage on television.

“When this guy stole the tank, something just clicked,” he told Filmmaker magazine in 2002.

He moved to Oakland in 1998 with 70 hours of footage he culled into the hourlong “Cul de Sac,” which was featured at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“Above and beyond his great charm and wit,” Noah Cowan, co-director of the festival said in a recent Internet posting on IndieWire, “Garrett was a clear-eyed, alarmingly prescient truth-teller.”

To see if making the documentary on Iraq was feasible, Scott first traveled to the war zone alone.

“We’d been seeing so much on television, but the news coverage was just empty,” Scott said recently. “I wanted to know what life was like for the men and women on the lowest end of the totem pole.”

Olds, who co-directed and edited the film, risked returning to Iraq with Scott because he knew that “Garrett would make something dynamic.”

In addition to his mother, Scott is survived by his father, Terry; stepmother, D.B.; a brother, and a sister.