Sometimes to make a little movie magic, all you need is Duke Ellington and an abandoned train station. 

There was Daniel Masciari, a Brooklyn-dwelling budding filmmaker who was traveling to Ithaca, N.Y., via a Greyhound bus. During the journey, the bus stopped in the city of Binghamton. While stepping off the bus to stretch his legs, Masciari was listening to Duke Ellington’s song “Dusk” on his ear buds, and he found himself standing in front of a derelict train station.

And something clicked.

“Suddenly I could see the mood of the film I wanted to make right there,” said Masciari. 

The result of that magical night is the movie Stationed At Home, which will have its world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival on March 7 in Glasgow, Scotland. 

“Stationed At Home is about a cab driver who’s waiting to see the first pass of the International Space Station in 1998 and he meets all these strangers during this very simple goal of his. The film is about finding unity and connection with the cosmos in an unlikely place,” said Masciari. 

The same magic that came to Masciari would come to affect Darryle Johnson, a native of Toledo and school teacher in Ithaca, the picturesque home of Cornell University in New York’s Finger Lakes region.

It all started with a chance meeting with the film’s casting director Eliza VanCort. 

“I was working for the Ithaca school district and had [VanCort’s] children in my class. This woman walks up to me on the blacktop and points at me and goes ‘You’re an actor!’”

Amazingly, he was. 

Johnson, 39, a 2003 graduate of the Toledo School for the Arts, went on to study acting at Oberlin College outside of Cleveland where he majored in African-American Studies, with a concentration in theater.

The meeting started an association with VanCort’s Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca where he was also a guest lecturer and completed the comprehensive two year Meisner Technique program. An actor for the past 15 years, Johnson co-starred with Avery Brooks (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) in Death of a Salesman at Oberlin and also acted in the critically acclaimed 2017 indie film The Manhattan Front.

“It was really a cosmic experience because I had been acting for much of my life but I wasn’t active at that time,” Johnson said.

He noted that he owes the successes of the past few years to VanCort.

“I then got involved in the Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca where my training and mentorship with Eliza commenced,” he said. 

VanCort was also a producer and actor in Stationed At Home in addition to helping with casting. 

“Darryle has a quality that all of the actors in the film have. He has a presence when you meet him and he has an energy of someone who’s highly creative,” said VanCort. “Really good actors are really good at the imagination but they’re also really good at simply pulling people towards them and Darryle has that quality and I recognized it immediately. This film is about finding magic in the mundane and you can’t just have any actor.”

Perhaps the most famous name attached to Stationed at Home is Jamie Donnelly, who played Jan, one of Rizzo’s “Pink Ladies,” in the classic movie musical Grease. She also originated the role of Magenta in the first Los Angeles and Broadway stage productions of what was at that time called The Rocky Horror Show. 

Even in the presence of such accomplished acting chops, Masciari commended Johnson’s performance as one that makes the movie. 

“Darryle is one of the best actors I’ve ever seen. He’s a genius,” said Masciari. “He really brings a mood to the film and a performance that I think is really going to touch peoples heart and make them laugh and cry.”

Stationed at Home, Masciari’s first feature film, was shot in atmospheric black and white mostly in the upstate New York town of Binghamton, roughly an hour south of Ithaca near the Pennsylvania border, and is now ready for premiere after a long odyssey since it gained the necessary funds to complete production in 2021. 

The Wee Review, a Scottish arts and culture magazine, named the 120-minute film one of the 10 to see at the festival, which begins Wednesday and runs through March 9, comparing the work to that of celebrated indie filmmaker (and Ohio native) Jim Jarmusch. 

Masciari said the movie’s three planned showings at the festival (two of which are already sold out) will hopefully pique the interest of a distributer enough to bring the film to the general public stateside later this year.  

VanCort said her time working on the film deepened her interest in the human condition that has kept her in the acting field for so long. 

"Twenty years of teaching acting has made me an expert in human behavior — I see the impact people have on others. Everyone has a unique light, but it takes creative courage to let it shine,” she said, again noting the power of the second-billed Johnson. 

“Darryle’s light is undeniable. I saw it on the playground years ago, and it shines just as brilliantly on screen. Daniel saw it too, which is why this film is so riveting. He has a gift for recognizing raw talent — actors who may not have long resumes but possess an uncanny ability to captivate an audience.”

 For more information on the film, visit stationedathome.com.

First Published February 20, 2025, 3:00 p.m.