The signs, yellow with black block letters, were tacked on telephone poles to direct people from the freeway exit in Camarillo to UC, a few miles away in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains.

It was an odd sight, since there is no University of California campus located near Camarillo. The signs instead led drivers to California State University, Channel Islands.

But the informal signs weren't there to direct students to a school. They were put up to help actors and crew members find the set of "The Underclassman," a Miramax film shot on location at the CSUCI campus.

From October to mid-December, the university served as the backdrop for the fictitious Westbury School -- described as an elite private high school in Southern California -- where a young police detective goes undercover to break up a ring of international car thieves.

The shoot earned the university about $50,000 in fees, a nice bonus for a fledgling campus whose growth has been stalled by state budget cuts.

"I think it's good for us to have that kind of exposure. We also get some additional resources for the campus, which is a good thing," said university President Richard Rush.

"It's that infusion of not huge, one-time money that allows us to get that widget we need. We use it as sort of a rainy-day fund for various projects as they arise."

"The Underclassman" is one of dozens of feature films, television shows, commercials, music videos and commercial still-photography projects that have used the university campus as a location since 1999.

On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the campus was again ready for its close-up, serving as the backdrop for a government safety-training film. One building was transformed into an embassy while a nearby area was decorated as the embassy courtyard, site of a scripted car explosion.

"There will be some gunfire at night and the police will be alerted prior to filming this sequence," read the production's call sheet.

Most of the projects are filmed on the sections of campus that are not yet in use for classes. Film crews also schedule work during school breaks and in the summer, so students are disrupted as little as possible. Portions of the government training film were shot in the science building auditorium while students were still out on winter break.

In the past five years, CSUCI has recorded an average of $100,000 to $135,000 per year in revenue from such filming, said Joanne Coville, vice president for finance and administration. A film day generally brings in about $3,000, while a prep day nets half that.

The picturesque campus has drawn location scouts from Hollywood for decades, but it wasn't until the university took up residence in the late 1990s that filming really became a regular occurrence.

Camarillo State Hospital, which operated on the campus site for more than 60 years until its closure in 1997, was host to a handful of projects over the years. The biggest was the 1948 film "The Snake Pit," starring Olivia de Havilland as a patient in an insane asylum.

In 1999, CSUCI officials seeking ways to generate money to help open the campus decided to hire a firm to attract film projects to the campus. Today, Unreel Locations serves as the university's agent, pitching the site to location scouts, working out contracts and acting as a liaison between production crews and the campus during shoots.

Peg Meehan, owner of Unreel Locations, said the size of the campus and the number of its large rooms and buildings give location scouts a variety of options.

"At first, people came here to film a hospital," Meehan said. "Now people are coming here to film the beautiful campus. We are the upscale prep school location now. We're transitioning along with the rest of the property."

The university's first blockbuster project turned out to be "Pearl Harbor," filmed in 2000 and released a year later. The production used the campus for several days of filming, netting about $60,000. In addition to turning a former women's dining hall into hospital wards for the film, the crew gave the dining hall a fresh coat of white paint, tore out and replaced the old fluorescent light fixtures, and made other improvements.

At the university's request, many of those improvements were kept after the filming ended, giving the school a newly refurbished banquet room at no cost. That room is now known as the Grand Salon, and is used for large banquets and other special events.

"Because it's a new university, everybody is open-minded" about the changes made during film shoots, Meehan said. "If the president decides 'Let's keep it,' then they keep it."

Now that it's cleaned up, the Grand Salon has become a star in its own right. It has appeared in an episode of "The X-Files" and in the HBO film "Path to War," in which it doubled as a hospital for soldiers injured in Vietnam.

More recently, the room was transformed into a club inside an airplane for the movie "Soul Plane," featuring Snoop Dogg and Tom Arnold; it's due out later this year.

For "The Underclassman," half of the expansive room was painted burgundy and gold and filled with tables and chairs to look like a cafeteria.

An adjoining dining hall also was renovated for a film project, with new tile and dark wood paneling. That room, now called the Petit Salon, is used for receptions and small gatherings. During filming for "The Underclassman," shelves and desks were added to turn the space into a library.

Executive Producer Jim Dyer said CSUCI proved to be a good fit for "The Underclassman." The well-manicured grounds and Spanish mission-style architecture reminded filmmakers of the campus of Harvard-Westlake School, a prestigious private school in Los Angeles.

"The grounds are in such great shape. There were a lot of big windows," Dyer said of the CSUCI campus. "It just gave us a feeling that fit our movie."

When "The Underclassman" premieres, probably in August, CSUCI will have a starring role alongside actors Nick Cannon, Cheech Marin, Roselyn Sanchez, Kelly Hu and Shawn Ashmore.

Described as an action comedy, "The Underclassman" was one of the longest and largest productions shot on campus in the past five years. Its pre-shoot transformation of the campus into Westbury School took several weeks, plenty of paint and lumber, some well-chosen props and more than 100 extras sporting the burgundy and tan uniforms a Westbury student might wear.

To aid in the makeover, film crews erected a faux granite school sign in the center of the university mall. They added a headmaster's office, complete with fireplace, and built a basketball court with bleachers on the South Quad lawn.

They also transformed some of the old hospital day rooms into Spanish, math and home-economics classrooms, and added bright yellow lockers and fake stucco columns along one exterior corridor.

A courtyard in the South Quad became the catering station for cast and crew. The makeup and wardrobe trailers were lined up along the south end of the campus, and former hospital day rooms were transformed into prop and supply houses.

One of the former hospital dining halls was set up as the film's construction mill, where crews built sets and props. Another large room, once in use as a studio for the Channel Islands Ballet, became a photography studio where publicity photos could be taken.

"We got everything we needed there," Dyer said after the shooting had wrapped. "We put our construction mill out there, all the people we use to make a movie ... There was room for all of us out there. They were very nice people at the school."

The vast quantity of large, vacant rooms and buildings is one of the selling points of CSUCI as a location, Meehan said.

"There's a lot of flexibility," she added. "They can hold on to an area for a long time. They have the freedom to leave their sets and come back and do re-shoots."

But the campus' location can be a drawback. CSUCI sits nine miles outside of the "30-mile zone" that is used by film and television unions to determine whether the project is considered a local shoot. Filming outside the 30-mile zone generally costs more and requires additional benefits for the cast and crew.

Another drawback to filming is the growth on campus. Opportunities for filming are expected to decrease as the university adds students and remodels more of the hospital site, making it harder to film without inconveniencing students.

"As we have more people on campus, it will become more difficult," Rush said. "We don't want to affect the academic programs."

But Meehan said that if the university wants to stay in the film business, the industry will continue to use the site.

"It's such a unique look. There'll always be people who want to film here," she said. "We just have to keep adjusting for the faculty and students."

So far, CSUCI's students seem to enjoy having the cameras on campus. One day as scenes for "The Underclassman" were being filmed in front of the Bell Tower, a group of CSUCI students stopped to star-gaze and to admire the line of shiny new Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, Porsche and Audi automobiles and SUVs parked along the mall.

"It's cool," said Dev Chahil, 22, a senior biology major from Thousand Oaks. "It's not annoying at all."

"Actually, I think it'll bring the school some popularity," added his classmate, Sora Yoon, a 20-year-old junior from Oxnard. "It also takes your mind off all the studying."