When John Carpenter was writing the screenplay
that would become Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), he and Joston
were neighbors. Carpenter has said that Joston's sardonic sense of
humor directly influenced the way Carpenter wrote the Napoleon Wilson
character, which Joston later played in the film.
In the early 1980s, when John Carpenter was scheduled to direct
Firestarter (1984), the film adaptation of Stephen King's novel, Joston was considered for the role of John Rainbird, the Native-American assassin, but after Universal Pictures executives fired Carpenter from the project following the commercial failure of The Thing (1982) and replaced him with Mark L. Lester, the role of Rainbird was given to George C. Scott.
Within several months of Joston's June 1998 death, his friends and
family founded the F. Darwin Solomon Endowment at the North Carolina
School of the Arts in Winston-Salem in order to commemorate Joston's
life and career.
He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1960.