THE MOVIES: Gang Girl

On Manhattan’s Upper West Side last week two gangs met in a bloodless rumble. As shooting began on the $5,000,000 film version of West Side Story, the principal street fighters were Hollywood dancers with heavy makeup and bleached hair; but a more genuine group stood by with scornful interest. Wearing checked trousers and colored shirts which, by their own description, gave them a “continental Ivy League” look, far more authentic than the dated T-shirts and Levi’s of the dancers, the onlookers could claim to be competent critics. On hand as extras, they were members of the Massadors Division of the Sportsmen, storm troopers from Manhattan’s legions of delinquency. And with them—carrying a clip board and wearing striped toreador pants, white-flower earrings and gold sandals—was the woman who had rounded them up.

Half & Half. At 40, Sally Perle is an independent casting agent, a supplier of all types of extras and bit players for films made in the New York area—and the only specialist in gangs. Part casting director and part actor’s agent, she is a professional hybrid. In the old Hollywood days, Central Casting did most of it. But now that more and more movies are filmed on location, there is room for the likes of Sally.

“You have to run a Woolworth’s-type business—sell in quantity,” she says.

Sometimes hiring as many as 500 actors a day, she signs their checks each night, calls up her next-day’s list, one by one, in telephone jags that leave her hoarse and often keep her awake until 4 a.m. (Her clients, who need the money, don’t mind if she wakes them.) In her file of 5,000 aspiring actors, Sally can find almost any type that walks and a few that crawl—and if she can’t turn up a fake McCoy, she goes out and finds a real one.

When Elia Kazan called Sally one 4:30 a.m. and casually requested 250 “chaste teen-agers,” she soon had a string of buses rolling toward Manhattan from a Catholic girls’ school in Trenton, NJ. “I want a dozen brunettes,” said Kazan another time. “And I want each one of them to be so luscious that without saying a word, you just know that . . .” She was also ready with blondes when Kazan changed his mind.

“I Warned Him.” Sally began specializing in gangs in 1956 while casting A Face in the Crowd, made contact through her son, who was then in high school. Signing up more duck-tailed mercenaries for The Last Angry Man, she took six toughs along with her as she prowled the streets with cash in hand to pay off others. The boys liked her, soon introduced her to the epicenter of gangland, a sort of Joint Chiefs of Staff. From Puerto Ricans to Sicilians, punks to finks, the Joint Chiefs have since taken care of the exact requirements of any screenplay being cast by Sally Perle.

The Massadors Division of the Sportsmen, who operate out of the Lower East Side when they are not mugging for the cameras, are particularly proud of 18year-old Richard Velez, who got to Hollywood with Sally’s help, made $2,100 in six weeks, came home with a contract, and rejoined the ranks on the West Side Story set wearing a Sunset Strip sports jacket, slacks (the boys call them “vines”) and wrap-around sunglasses (“shades”).

For some of Sally’s boys, luck runs the other way. Once, when she tried to recruit one Massador, she was told he had been killed. Sally asked what had happened. “Well,” came the answer matter-of-factly, “he went out of his territory. He wanted to go to this party in Brooklyn. I warned him . . .”