Ivan Goff

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Ivan Goff (April 17 1910 - September 23 1999) was an Australian screenwriter.

From ‘Made it, Ma – top of the world!’ in 1949’s White Heat to ‘Morning, Angels’, ‘Morning, Charlie’, in the quintessential 1970s series Charlie’s Angels, Ivan Goff enjoyed the longest Hollywood screenwriting career to out of any Australian to date.

Goff was born in Perth in 1910, the son of two concert musicians. At 15, he began writing for a local newspaper, but soon became dissatisfied by the isolation he felt. "Living in Australia made me crazy," he later said in an interview. "It took a month for a book to get to Australia, a year for a play and forever for an idea."

Goff eventually moved to England and in 1933 he published a recollection of his voyage, No Longer Innocent. Goff worked in several jobs, including as a bookie, while trying to break into journalism. He eventually found work with the Daily Mirror, which in the mid-1930s sent Goff to Los Angeles as the paper’s Hollywood correspondent. He decided to settle there, and became a staff writer at Republic Studios, where his work included uncredited contributions to several of the westerns in The Three Mesquiteers series, and a Gene Autry vehicle, Sunset In Wyoming (1941). He also wrote a comedy at Warner Bros., My Love Came Back (1940).

At the end of the war, Roberts and Goff decided to remain as a team, and wrote Prejudice (1949), a short feature about anti-Semitism made by the Protestant Film Commission. They also wrote a screenplay based on a Ben Hecht story, The Shadow, which was never filmed, but which attracted the interest of Warner Bros. who hired them to rewrite a murder mystery, Backfire (1950). Their work on that film impressed the studio enough to sign them to a five-year contract.

From the Australian Writers' Guild.