MOVIE TREATMENT: Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)
FADE IN:
Dust plains. Endless. Cattle skeletons sun-bleached and smiling in the dirt. A wind hisses through creosote like it knows a secret. A man rides into this ruin on a horse too tired to live and too dumb to die. His name is Merle. Once a singer. Once a lover. Now a shadow in spurs.
He carries a guitar with one string and a heart torn open like a blister.
He is looking for Fanny.
Fanny of the laugh that could undo a priest. Fanny of the hips that made men renounce geography. Fanny who told him to be strong and then walked out with a mule-skinner named Dutch who wore cologne and shot rattlesnakes for fun.
She left Merle in the middle of a love song.
Now Merle drags that song across the desert like a broken leg.
The locals say Fanny dances at The Rusted Mirage, a bar built on an old mine shaft. It sits at the edge of a dead lake where the water’s gone but the longing remains. Inside, broken men drink varnish and pray to forgotten gods. There’s a jukebox that plays nothing but Bee Gees covers sung by a toothless man in a gold suit. Fanny’s silhouette haunts the stage, flanked by two coyotes who think they’re her backup dancers.
Merle stumbles in like a man arriving at his own funeral. He sees her. She sees him. Silence falls like a noose.
He says
Fanny. Be tender.
She says
Boy you shoulda thought of that when you threw my birthday pie in the fire.
He says
That was an accident.
She says
So was my affection.
They duel. Not with pistols. With ballads. His sorrowful wail versus her falsetto fury. The bartender cries. A dog howls. Someone overdoses on sassafras in the corner.
By dawn, Merle lies collapsed. Empty. She kisses him once—on the temple, like a burial rite. Then disappears into the jukebox, leaving behind only a boa made of scorpion tails and crushed velvet.
FADE OUT.
A narrator, gravel-voiced and full of scorn, speaks:
Love’s a fever dream. Some wake up cured. Some never wake at all.
Cinemorphosis 
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