Marco Zappia

Marco Zappia was a Primetime Emmy-winning picture editor who worked on dozens of television series and specials over the course of a career lasting more than 40 years. His numerous credits included Maude, The Jeffersons, All in the Family, Archie Bunker's Place, MacGyver, Faerie Tale Theatre, Who's the Boss?, Boy Meets World, Home Improvement and many others. Zappia earned 18 Emmy nominations overall and won two — in 1971, for the comedy variety show Hee-Haw, and in 1981, for the holiday special Perry Como's Christmas in the Holy Land.

Zappia, a native of Los Angeles, was working as a television repairman when his wife spotted a newspaper ad for a video engineering job at CBS and encouraged him to apply. Despite limited knowledge of the technology at the time, he studied at night and scored the gig. He helped install the first electronic editing system at the network before making the transition to editing himself. He chronicled these and many other details of his career in a 2013 memoir, Smartest Guy in the Room.

He received his first credit on Hee-Haw, which resulted in his first Emmy. His work in the years that followed included long relationships with such shows as All in the Family (95 episodes), Archie Bunker's Place (97 episodes), Who's the Boss (188 episodes), Home Improvement (203 episodes) and Eight Simple Rules (75 episodes).

In addition to his work as an editor, Zappia helped to develop technical advances in the field, including research and development of the multicamera Avid Editing System. He was the first editor to use Avid to edit a multicam sitcom for an episode of Home Improvement.

In addition to his Emmys, he was nominated for two CableACE awards.

Zappia died December 22, 2013, in Ventura, California. He was 76.