Malvin Wald, a screenwriter who was nominated for an Academy Award for the 1948 movie “The Naked City” and helped create the “police procedural” genre, died Thursday at 90 at a Los Angeles hospital.

Wald wrote dozens of scripts for motion pictures and TV shows including “Peter Gunn,” “Daktari” and “Perry Mason.” He wrote the story for “The Naked City,” then co-wrote the screenplay with Albert Maltz, one of the “Hollywood 10” of blacklisted writers during the McCarthy era.

“The Naked City” was a groundbreaking, gritty drama, filmed on location in New York, about police investigating a murder. It ended with the now-famous line: “There are 8 million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” Wald, a Brooklyn native, researched the story by following real New York homicide detectives.

“No one had done a film where the real hero was a hardworking police detective, like the ones I knew in Brooklyn,” Wald told the Hollywood Reporter last year. “We knew we were making a new genre that became the police procedural.”

In addition to Wald’s nomination, the movie won two Oscars for film editing and cinematography. It also spawned a popular television show of the same name that aired from 1958 to 1963 and inspired countless others.

During World War II, Wald was in the Army Air Forces and helped make more than 30 training and recruitment films in Culver City. He also taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California.