I spend a few days every week at Dallas City Hall sitting in a storage closet recently converted into a "media office," where the only amenities are a long row of electric outlets and a large television that broadcasts City Council meetings Big Brother-style. The only way I survive these long days is the fact that City Hall — designed, I believe, on a dare by I.M. Pei — once appeared in a movie as the headquarters of Omni Consumer Products, the corporation that privatized, decimated and segregated a thinly veiled Dallas standing in as sordid "Old Detroit" and its wealthy counterpart "Delta City."

The north-south divide, I believe we call it. Man, sometimes I have to remember that director Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop, about a gunned-down cop resurrected as a robot who patrols violent Detroit streets that were actually dingy Dallas, is a 30-year-old movie sci-fi shoot-'em-up and not a present-day documentary.

RoboCop, which will screen this weekend in front of City Hall, is the most Dallas movie ever made, despite its Detroit setting — a violent, surreal love letter to a city that was, in '86, in the midst of a boom about to go bust, as evidenced by the under-construction skyline visible from OCP offices (which were not in City Hall after all, but on the 40th floor of Renaissance Tower). Watching it now is like looking at old home movies, a slightly faded memory of a time when Deep Ellum was still a mostly abandoned strip of storefronts, the Starck Club was a raid away from shuttering, Dallas High School hadn't yet fallen into disrepair (and rebirth), and downtown was still only beginning its decline.

"Dallas was functioning as a futuristic Detroit, but definitely the skyline is Dallas," said Peter Weller, the movie's star, in advance of his return to Dallas for the 30th anniversary screening. "It was, for the time, futuristic. I mean, back then, driving in to Dallas from the south, you could see that skyline of Dallas coming out of those flatlands from miles away. And it was remarkable."

Dallas was still being filmed here when Verhoeven pulled up, selling its toxic soap and phony diamonds; and former Talking Head David Byrne had been here just a year earlier, using sterile NorthPark Center as the town square in his True Stories. RoboCop might have been set in Detroit, but it was the only entertainment, before or since, to get this city right — its sanguine aspirations and its cynical failures.

During the summer of '86 I watched Verhoeven film a bit of the movie in Deep Ellum — shortly before they blew up a chunk of Elm Street. Back then there wasn't much down there, just vacant storefronts and plenty of room to go boom. I heard stories from other friends about the dynamiting of the Arts District gas station that was bigger than anyone expected.

I have seen RoboCop countless times — the first time on the University of Texas at Austin campus in 1987, during a sneak preview that made me more homesick than anything else, and most recently, like, two weeks ago. Once I even watched it in front of Dallas City Hall, during a screening I helped organize in 2011. In retrospect, that might have been a terrible idea. Several then-council members stuck around as the ultra-violence echoed off City Hall Plaza and ricocheted through downtown streets. At one point we couldn't tell if the sirens were on screen or behind us — behind us, turned out.

You can see for yourself Sunday at 7 p.m., when the Alamo Drafthouse screens RoboCop on the City Hall Plaza with Weller in attendance. That's no small get, considering the man inside the suit long ago tired of talking about the movie that made him famous — refusing, even, to take part in a new documentary about its filming in Dallas during the brutal summer of '86.

"Mostly, people wanted to know what it was like in the suit," Weller, the 70-year-old actor-turned-director-turned-college-professor, said a few days ago. "And I was like, man, I am done with that." Because nobody wants to be known as just a comic-con costume. Especially not a guy who played trumpet during his stint at North Texas State University in the 1960s and now teaches Italian Renaissance art history.

Weller, whose father was a federal judge in Dallas despite living in Fort Worth, returns here frequently to see friends, among them former Dallas Morning News photographer Jim Mahoney. He's seen the city grow up and out, and laments its sprawl. Deep Ellum, he said, has become a mall — "impersonal" — and he's not wrong. And he frets about the decimation of the city's core. It's little wonder I have a man-crush on Dr. Peter Weller.

"Dallas is a great city, but you know, I wish they would preserve more of it," he said. "Like Fort Worth has, you know what I'm saying? But Dallas was chosen to represent Detroit simply because of the modernization. And I loved it. I loved making the movie there. I rarely got to move through Dallas like I did during the shooting of that movie. But, God, I loved it, man."