Anecdotes

After working together on Assaut (1976), Joston and his co-star Austin Stoker remained friends for the rest of Joston's life.

When John Carpenter was writing the screenplay that would become Assaut (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.

He had one son, Shawn Solomon, with whom he worked on the transportation crews of Sailor & Lula (1990) and The Night Before (1988).