Thirty years ago, Daniel Robert Durrett, a Dallas native and movie fan who hosts and produces the Drive-By Movies podcast, was a teenager working a summer job at the General Cinema 6 in Mesquite. The theater was promoting one of the season's biggest movies, and it had somehow snagged an important prop to do it: a suit used in director Paul Verhoeven’s newest sci-fi action film, RoboCop.

Durrett's boss asked him to wear it in front of the theater to attract more customer traffic. So he roasted inside the suit in the Texas summer heat “because I happened to be the same size as the actor or the stuntman who wore it,” he says.

RoboCop takes place in a futuristic Detroit, dubbed "Old Detroit," where crime runs rampant and the police department is a private entity run by a private military and security company where executives conspire with the criminals they are hired to fight. Durrett had no idea this massive sleeper hit, which went on to become the 16th highest-grossing film of the year and a staple of the satiric sci-fi genre, was made in his hometown of Dallas until one of its more memorable and destructive scenes came up.

The military and security firm, OCP, constructs RoboCop — played by University of North Texas alum Peter Weller — from the human remains of a fallen Detroit police officer. A crime kingpin named Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) and his gang had murdered the officer, Alex J. Murphy.

RoboCop starts to recall his human identity and track down members of Boddicker’s gang after stopping a robbery at a gas station that gang member Emil Antonowsky (Paul McCrane) blows up by igniting a puddle of gasoline with his cigarette.

Durrett says he recognized Dallas when the gas station went up in flames.

“That gas station was down the street from a barbecue joint my dad loved to go to and was just a vacant gas station forever,” Durrett says. “The moment I saw that in the movie, I was like, "Whoa, that’s that friggin’ gas station.'”

The public didn’t seem to know the Orion Pictures production, Verhoeven's first blockbuster, was in town filming in the summer of 1986. Only the people involved in the production and some city officials who gave the go-ahead for Verhoeven and his crew to film all over the Dallas area were in the know.

"Films and commercials were being shot out there and a lot of people were coming to Dallas to shoot. For a while, Dallas was called the Third Coast." – actress Angie Bolling Facebook

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More than most Texas cities, Dallas attracted productions for TV movies of the week; commercials; a few Oscar-winning classics, like director Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde; and the primetime CBS soap opera Dallas.

"At that time, studios in Las Colinas were new, and a lot of productions were going on out there," says Dallas actress Angie Bolling, who played Murphy's wife in a series of flashback scenes in RoboCop. "Films and commercials were being shot out there and a lot of people were coming to Dallas to shoot. For a while, Dallas was called the Third Coast."

Since then, the competition to attract more productions with tax incentives has become fierce among states like Texas, Louisiana and Georgia. The Texas Legislature created the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program in 2004 to offer tax breaks to all sorts of media companies and production studios that moved to the state and agreed to minimum spending limits in their communities. Studios still send productions to Dallas to shoot their stuff, but the Texas Legislature has slowly chipped away at those tax incentives over the years.

RoboCop, however, was a different metallic beast for Dallas.

“I think we all were aware it was a pretty cool film because of all the different stuff they had been doing,” says Dallas film commissioner Janis Burklund, who worked as a second unit production assistant on the RoboCop set. “We were doing a lot of made-for-TV movies, which we called ‘diseases of the week.’ Having a guy in costume blowing things up was very different.”

Dallas was more than just the economic epicenter for all of the film’s explosions, gunfire and endless downpours of fake blood that Verhoeven wanted for his movie. Dallas' role in RoboCop was physically bigger even than Weller’s crime-fighting robot.

“The whole movie was shot in Dallas, except for the steel factory scene at the end,” Verhoeven says from his home in Holland. “Ultimately, we felt that Dallas would give us that, shall we say, Old Detroit.”

RoboCop, the image used for the original poster. AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo

"You are going to be a bad mother fucker."

The movie’s script came from the collaborative minds of screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner. Both came up with similar ideas for a futuristic action flick featuring a superhuman police officer in a live-action comic book film. The two teamed up to write RoboCop in 1984 and started shopping it around the studios. The idea was met with a series of rejections until movie producer Jon Davison saw something worth exploring in their treatment and passed it on to a senior vice president at Orion Pictures.

Neumeier and Miner’s movie featured a mix of styles that pitted machines against ruthless gangsters in an urban wasteland and wove the narrative with a Frankenstein story in which the central character struggles to understand his identity. The movie also explored the sinister corporate influence on national defense and public service, demonstrating how profit and pursuit of the public good always seem to be at odds.

“I was moonlighting on the set of Blade Runner in the Burbank studios that’s now Warner Bros.,” Neumeier says, referring to the 1982 sci-fi film directed by Ridley Scott. “I would go over at night and just join the crew because it was so big that nobody knew. In that location on that set, I had that vision of this policeman and for RoboCop. I think location is really powerful in that way.”