It’s a Small Show at Hollywood Park : Horse racing: Crowd (4,722), handle ($818,165) less than expected for first day of intertrack wagering from Santa Anita.

A lot of movie extras were there, but they were too busy shooting a scene for a James Caan-Nicolas Cage film to help boost the handle as Hollywood Park launched off-track betting on the Santa Anita races Wednesday.

A crowd of 4,722, less than Hollywood Park’s management expected, turned out at the Inglewood track to bet $818,165 on the nine races at Santa Anita, where the on-track attendance of 31,600 was more than 10,000 under last year’s opening-day crowd for the Oak Tree meeting. Recent state legislation has enabled California’s major tracks to take bets on each other’s races.

The other important new center in the off-track network is Los Alamitos, and the Orange County track opened with 3,607 fans betting $543,047 on Santa Anita’s card. This was better than Del Mar did Wednesday with its new, state-of-the-art simulcast facility. The numbers at the San Diego County track were 3,221 people and $436,308 at the windows.

Besides Hollywood, Los Alamitos and Del Mar, Santa Anita’s races were available to 11 other satellite facilities in California and out-of-state locations that include Nevada. Overall, Wednesday’s attendance was 50,496, and the handle was $6.6 million, compared to almost 52,000 and $6.9 million a year ago.

The temperature at partly air-conditioned Santa Anita was over 100 degrees, a fact not lost on many of the Hollywood Park patrons, who avoided the heat in the track’s comfortable six-story pavilion. The $34-million structure, built in time for the running of the first Breeders’ Cup races in 1984, was poorly planned and helped throw Hollywood Park into a serious debt situation, but with the arrival of year-round intertrack betting, the facility has taken on a second life. Hollywood Park will now be open annually for 280 days and 260 nights of racing, either live or via satellite.

Rick Henson, general manager of Hollywood Park, had hoped for more than 5,000 bettors Wednesday. “We had good advertising,” Henson said. “Santa Anita was good enough to include our opening with many of their ads. And we had the same giveaway (a commemorative stein) as the one at Santa Anita.”

Still, there were bettors on Santa Anita’s races who might otherwise have stayed home, rather than make the trip across town to Arcadia. One was a commodities trader from Palos Verdes.

“I came to Hollywood because there’s no smog and no heat, like you would have gotten today at Santa Anita,” he said. “It takes me an hour and 10 minutes minimum to drive to Santa Anita. I go to the races once a week on the average. I don’t like betting Santa Anita anyplace, though, because I think they’re behind the times. Why can’t they give us exactas on every race like the other tracks do?”

Another fan from West Los Angeles, who would identify himself only as Carl, said he has been coming to the races since the days of Kayak II, who won the Hollywood Gold Cup in 1939. He also is asking for more exactas.

“Without the exactas, they force you to play the daily triple,” he said. “How can you pick the winners of three races when you have enough trouble picking just one?”

Carl also was critical of Hollywood Park’s new admission policy, under which a fan makes one payment, of $5.50 for grandstand and $7.50 for clubhouse, and has parking and a daily program included. At most tracks, those three items are paid for separately.

“I come to the track with three friends sometimes,” Carl said. “We’re paying too much, considering we’re only parking one car.”

Margaret Blessing, who works in a payroll department in Santa Monica, said she wouldn’t have bet the races Wednesday had she been required to travel to Santa Anita. “It would have been too hot over there,” she said. “Living close to Hollywood, I’ll probably come over here on the spur of the moment now that they’re taking bets on Santa Anita.”