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cepted Mayer's offer and thereafter regarded him not only as his benefactor but as his true and respected friend.
Not so happy were some other associations. Neilan gave Mayer a hard time with his virtually independent production of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Not unreasonably, Neilan had adapted Thomas Hardy's classic so that the heroine, Tess, played by Blanche Sweet, went to the gallows at the end. Mayer didn't like this finish. He claimed that audiences would be depressed by seeing the poor, tormented woman pay for her misfortunes (and for murdering her husband) in such a way. He insisted that Neilan shoot an alternate scene in which a messenger arrived at the last moment to say that Tess had been reprieved. Neilan fought against this insistence. He called Mayer every kind of boor. But Mayer compelled the alteration. He was now in command.
This indicated to Neilan the new direction of the wind. His contract called for two more pictures. The first of these he arranged to shoot abroad. It was called The Sporting Venus. Again his star was Miss Sweet. His leading man was a new young British actor, Ronald Colman, whom he picked up when he went to Scotland to shoot the film. After that Neilan did one at the studio, Mike, then unregretfully departed and returned to First National, where he could still make films independently.
There was naturally much confusion in the studio during the first few weeks. The influx of new people from the merged companies created traffic jams. Technical staffs were disordered and there was wrangling over space. An example of the consequential chaos was reported in the trade paper, Variety:
"Last week, Hobart Henley was working on a set and used a large amount of electrical equipment and a large crew. Robert Leonard was working on a Mae Murray picture {Circe). He passed Henley's set, looked in, saw no director or cast, only the electrical crew. He told the crew to take the