Mike Gargiulo

Mike Gargiulo was an American director.

He started his TV career at WNBC, working as a staff director in the early 1950s, and did most all of the local shows in New York until 1959 when NBC selected him to join the State Department project to build a television studio in Moscow and introduce color TV to the Russian people during the exchange.

It was in this studio that Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon had their famous "kitchen debate," which Gargiulo recorded and rushed back to NBC. The tapes were shared with CBS and ABC within hours and are said to have potentially helped usher along the era of modern-day, televised political debates.

For 50 years, Gargiulo directed some of TV's favorite game shows, including Password, The Price Is Right and $10,000 Pyramid. He also produced more than 30 years of variety specials for CBS, covering the Thanksgiving Day Parade, for which he earned an Emmy nomination in 1974, New Year's Eve and other events.

In 2015, The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences awarded Gargiulo an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement. He has accrued a total of 31 nominations and nine Emmy Awards in his career.

Gargiulo died November 30, 2021 in Manhattan, New York. He was 95.