Steve Railsback could come up with a cure for cancer while parachuting from the lower atmosphere and singing a Rasta version of the Star-Spangled Banner and I’d still only think of him as the guy with the halting, awkward delivery in the great The Stunt Man. (He’s already done something close to that skydiving achievement, and you know it: Scenes from the Goldmine. That’s goes above and beyond playing Charles Manson, Ed Gein and being in Cockfighter.)

But I can be swayed by heart-tugging projects, and an actor/sometime-director seeing one of his late brother’s last screenplays come to fruition fits the bill. Steve Railsback will direct Barstow, a story about “three desperate characters, one of whom finds hope in a
small, depressed town.
” Penned by his brother Philip, who died in 2005, the script is based on Philip Railsback’s own experience in Barstow in the late ’90s. Keith Carradine and Scott Wilson are attached to the project.