Segalove comes out as the child of a movie star haven where messy lawns are reported to the police and designer labels are removed from hand-me-downs for the maids. She reveals some of the dirt among the manicured yards, including a local custom of girls jumping from a terraced lawn at Beverly Hills High to induce miscarriages, and her friend Yasmin Hayworth’s wish that Rita was a “natural mother.”
Ilene Segalove was born in 1950 in Los Angeles. She studied communication arts at Loyola University and received a degree in fine arts from the University of California in Santa Barbara. Working in video since 1972, when she bought a Portapak from Nam June Paik's girlfriend, Ilene Segalove was initially, "offended by [video's] invasive quality and seduced by its power." A self-described "child of Beverly Hills," Segalove began pointing the camera at "familiar things," producing quasi-documentaries about her family (The Mom Tapes, 1973-75) and American TV culture (TV is OK, 1976).
Segalove was a member of the group Telethon, with Billy Adler, John Margolis, and Van Schley, which designed installations featuring commercial TV collages, and guest edited an issue of Radical Software, "The TV Environment" (2:2, 1971).