Illustration by Antoine Doré.
Brad Casebier arrives at the TV commercial shoot dressed in a directorial-casual uniform of khakis and a navy cardigan. He grasps a wrench while standing next to a water heater that has been laid on a table and tucked in, as if in convalescence. Where its anthropomorphic head is situated, someone has written “I have corrosion too :(” in black Sharpie. Two stuffed dogs have been piled on a chair at stage left, next to a director’s chair etched with the name “P. Anderson.” Casebier, the co-founder and CEO of Radiant Plumbing & Air Conditioning, is running lines with Christie Gallatin, a human resources business partner at Radiant, who stands sentry on the other side of the water heater, looking grave and downtrodden.
“Is it, ‘Everything is going to be OK’? Or ‘Everything is OK’?” she asks him. She is wearing a blue shirt and a pin-straight red wig, as she channels Julianne Moore’s character, Linda Partridge, from Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film Magnolia.
Although she doesn’t know that yet.
A week prior, on March 5, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver had featured Radiant’s movie-spoof commercials in a six-minute segment, which culminated in a challenge to create an ad based on a film of Oliver’s choice, sight unseen. Only Casebier, his wife and co-founder, Sarah, and a few members of their team—including marketing director Odalis Suarez and mass media production manager Jimmy Zuniga—know what the selected film is. But the non-disclosure agreement they’ve signed with the Emmy Award–winning HBO show is so strict that even the commercial’s actors have been kept in the dark.
“So, he’s dying,” Casebier tells Gallatin with Spielbergian sobriety, gesturing at a water heater that has assumed the role of a dying man, originally played with aplomb by Jason Robards. “This is like your final message.”
Casebier is standing in for Radiant employee Joseph McClughan, who is perched just off-set, preparing to tackle the part of caretaker Phil Parma. Now, the Radiant founder shows him how he’d like him to gently extend an arm towards the languishing water heater, and McClughan dutifully mirrors the movement.
“Tell him I’m OK, everything is going to be OK,” Gallatin says, carefully but firmly. Then the emotion of the scene washes over her. “How DARE you judge me,” she bellows, storming off the set.
The Casebiers. Photo courtesy Radiant.
Radiant has parodied a wide range of films, from Napoleon Dynamite to The Avengers, but with its kaleidoscope of discordant storylines, this Magnolia spoof is their greatest challenge to date. In fact, once the Casebiers, Suarez, and Zuniga received the name of the film from Oliver, they took a weekend just to watch and digest it. The following Monday, they put charts up all over the walls, A Beautiful Mind–style, to help them diagram the adaptation. They quickly realized it would require shooting between 15 and 20 scenes just for a quick 60-second spot. But the stakes were high, considering Oliver has promised to donate $10,000 to Central Texas Food Bank if they were successful in their efforts.
The week that follows is a montage of toilets and water heaters in peril. It all culminates in Magnolia’s iconic finale, in which a mass of frogs begins falling from the sky. But in the burgeoning Radiant-verse, that army of amphibians has been replaced with plummeting commodes. From a platform in Radiant’s Austin warehouse, Casebier gleefully drops toilets, and watches them shatter in a satisfying spray of porcelain around one of his company’s branded trucks.
Radiant has parodied films as wide ranging as The Avengers and Magnolia. All stills courtesy Radiant.
To better convey the scale of the toilet storm, the Radiant team has built a stop-motion backyard set out of construction paper and cardboard. Rudimentary trees have been hand-drawn in a compellingly avant-garde background. Zuniga films as a colleague throws miniature toilets—chunking them hard, to simulate the shock of the biblical storm—onto the crude cardboard set. “That was really good,” Zuniga exhales, after a long, tense pause.
Submitted and eventually aired on Oliver’s program on April 30, “Magtoiletolia” is the culmination of a decades-long creative journey for the Austin plumbing company. It’s an odyssey in which many toilets have been bedazzled, destroyed, and brought to life (or at least into robot-hood, as when one was painstakingly modeled after R2D2 in Radiant’s Star Wars adaptation). Last Week Tonight’s spotlight might suggest that they are doing something new and novel, and, in a way, they are. Surely no other plumbing company has stretched its cinematic wings so wide and ambitiously. But they’re also tapping into a proud Austin tradition of schlocky, low-budget commercials that have become as much a part of the culture as live music and gentrification. Even as the city evolves into a bougie tech haven—and streaming services eclipse local television—the phenomenon persists. As a smitten John Oliver was quick to point out, it’s advertising so bizarre and endearingly cheesy that, well, it just might work.While every city has its respective Mount Rushmore of local business personalities who have assumed “ironic icon” status (New Orleans personal injury lawyer Morris Bart set the bar when an enamored 2-year-old named Grayson Dobra demanded a Bart-themed birthday party in 2015), Austin has a particularly rich history of local advertising. For one, lawyer Betty Blackwell, whose high-drama effort in the ’90s haunted an entire TV generation with its hand-wringing mother lamenting her prison-bound son. Then there’s the Nickel Pickle, née Scott Elder, who dressed in a gherkin costume to seduce potential Mitsubishi buyers. Another elite: Karen Richards of crystal emporium Nature’s Treasures Texas, often splashed across billboards in a cave-like amethyst (“We rock”).
This was the scene the Casebiers entered into in 1999, when they opened Radiant Plumbing & Air Conditioning. Now, the company has 250 employees and serves homes across Central Texas. If any Austinites don’t watch cable, and have thus managed to avoid the brand’s singularly idiosyncratic commercials, they’ve still likely paused to study one of the company’s trucks wrapped in action-packed scenes, such as one in which Casebier is ejecting a blast of cool air onto a dog via an AC duct. Or maybe they’ve done a double take when passing Radiant’s window displays at its North Loop area office. These have included the holiday-themed “Santa Clog” and “Toilight,” which comprised several different vampiric toilets. They might also feel compelled to “just call Radiant” after experiencing the company’s many radio spots, which are as much a celebration of corny publicity as the television commercials (take “Bradhemian Rhapsody,” in which Casebier delivers a clog-inspired rendition of the Queen classic).
This unique tradition can all be traced back to one man: Driftwood-based marketing guru, Roy Williams. Casebier became familiar with Williams’ work through his lawyer brother-in-law, who was working for “The Wizard of Ads” during the early 2000s. At the time, Radiant was still relatively new, and the Casebiers were debating the best approach to spreading the word about their homespun business. So, they decided to attend one of his two-day marketing classes to help hone their vision.
Casebier became a steady client of Williams, and a friendship quickly grew between the two. In fact, Radiant has since donated labor to many of the marketing icon’s projects, including the construction of a new building on the South Austin campus of his nonprofit business school, Wizard Academy. That relationship had another important consequence, as it helped pave the way to Radiant’s partnership with Wizard of Ads employee Jacob Harrison, who has since written and produced 70 percent of the company’s radio spots.
To this day, Williams sees Casebier as something of a protégé. The former even has a standing offer to make Casebier a partner in his company, assuming he’d ever forsake plumbing. Though Radiant no longer works with the group, Williams has nonetheless watched their advertising ethos develop with a sensei’s pride.
Most of the personality-driven ads you see around Austin are in a category that Williams calls “long purchase cycle.” Food and entertainment are sectors we engage with every day, and can thus benefit from direct-response advertising such as commercials touting sales and events. But plumbing—like legal services, jewelry purchases, and car investments—is an area that consumers engage with less frequently. Williams uses the example of an engagement, where a jeweler is typically one of the first to know about a proposal. The same is true for water heaters, which a homeowner can expect to replace once or twice in a lifetime. Because a plumbing service can’t anticipate when said replacement will be required (discounting, say, a devastating winter freeze), it behooves a company to build a sense of trust over time.
“If you win the heart, the mind will follow,” Williams says, with a lifetime advertiser’s knack for catchy aphorisms. “It’s impossible to be afraid of Brad Casebier. You get to know him on TV or on the radio, or better, in person, and you realize this guy is just trying to enjoy life. He’s definitely not trying to pick my pocket. He’s not even really trying to convince me to buy something from him.” In other words, Casebier is just a cable auteur with a gift for extreme dad humor.
Besides his mentor’s teachings, Casebier was also heavily inspired by Old Spice’s advertising, which he holds up as the pinnacle of a company daring to be outrageous. Take the male grooming company’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign, in which a shirtless Isaiah Amir Mustafa played on heartthrob tropes, like galloping horseback on a beach, to hawk body wash.
“These guys get it,” Casebier says. “They’re not trying to say, ‘Ours works better, it lasts an hour longer than somebody else’s.’ They’re not worried about the competition. They’re just exposing a personality, and people can be repelled by it or attracted to it. It doesn’t matter.”
Like Old Spice, Radiant’s work does have its share of haters. Typically, this comes from viewers who find the commercials irritating or unprofessional, for which they even receive occasional hate mail. But that’s OK in the eyes of Casebier, who’d rather be memorable or divisive than easily forgotten. “Everybody else’s ads are completely uninteresting,” he opines. “There’s nothing likable about it. It’s just kind of, ‘here’s the deal I’m offering.’ There’s no personality attached to it.”
The Casebiers and their creative collaborators want Radiant’s ads to be shareable. They have even nestled “Easter eggs” into many of them (look out for a picture of a bunch of flowers that Zuniga took in New York) to motivate repeat viewings.
Creating an ad on a shoestring budget—or no budget, as is more often the case—requires finesse. There is a fine line between an ad that is endearingly thrifty and one that feels cheap. “I’m kind of the director that draws the line: We’re gonna use Crayolas and cardboard for this piece, and then this needs to be really polished and produced. That’s just some weird internal instinct I have, and it’s where it hits my funny bone,” Casebier reflects. “I don’t think it would work for a lot of professional industries, but we’re plumbers. I don’t think people expect us to be good at building ads, and I think it just exposes the humanity.”
Jimmy Zuniga, Radiant’s mass media production manager, says the way the ads are shot is meant to tap into our nostalgia. If “The Toilet Exorcist” has you recalling childhood days home sick from school, watching Betty Blackwell’s boxy shoulder pads and heavy twang, that’s intentional. Great cinema, after all, is often an ode to the filmmakers of the past.
Casebier concedes that during production of “Magtoiletolia,” he accessed a dark plane. “I took full control of this one, in a very, very possessive way,” he says. “I was realizing that, man, I’m kind of intense. I need to chill out a bit.” In general, he has tried to give the team more agency in the creation of its advertising, chiefly because he wants them to trust their own instincts.
Though low- or no-budget, Radiant’s bits have become serious business for its employees. Zuniga and Odalis Suarez once spent weeks attaching mirrored tiles to a “disco toilet” created for a window display with the accompanying text: “IT’S POTTY TIME.”
The sparkling fixture, Suarez explains, was a project they took on “just for the sake of it.” She nicked her hands several times in the bedazzling process, and they had to buy ten rounds of mirrored tiles, which employees at Radiant’s call center would often help glue on during their breaks. Although a radiant toilet indeed, Zuniga warns that it is also a bit dangerous because they didn’t have tools to properly cut the tiles to fit. It’s now displayed on a platform, away from supple tushies.
The “actors” in Radiant’s commercials are mainly employees, cast by Zuniga, all of whom have expressed interest in participating. But stardom, no matter how trivial, doesn’t come without its share of sacrifices. For example, when Zuniga approached Calvin Marshall, an install coordinator, about playing Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet’s character) in “Toilet Dune,” it required some serious soul-searching when he was forced to shave. “Without the facial hair, I look much younger than I actually am,” he says. “I actually turned 30 this year, but without the facial hair, I look maybe 20… if I’m being generous.”
But like Christian Bale, who lost over 60 pounds for The Machinist, Marshall would transform himself for the sake of the craft. His beard martyrdom paid off too, with Oliver singling him out in his March segment, calling him “more of a Timothée Chalamet type than the real Timothée Chalamet.”
The nod from the late-night host was vindicating for Radiant’s employees. “Not to be boastful, but I feel like it’s a long time coming,” says Manny Garcia, a junior system administrator, who starred as a plunger-wielding Rocket Raccoon in the company’s Guardians of the Galaxy/Avengers spoof. The commercials were too good not to be noticed, he observes. “We never knew who it would be, but I think there’s always been the mentality of, ‘These are going to be picked up by somebody, someday.’”
When asked whether the recognition has changed his ambitions for Radiant’s artistic oeuvre, Casebier turns pensive. Yes, he had fun during Magtoiletolia’s two-week development, he admits. More than anything, the experience has inspired him to look beyond his day-to-day, to consider challenges he could take on in the film and entertainment industry for himself. Few at Radiant know, for example, that he is also a gifted musician. Casebier wonders what he might produce if he sets aside the mandate to sell toilets and water heaters. He has, in the parlance of the Wizard of Ads, won Austin’s hearts and minds—and even John Oliver’s. Is he primed for the creative demands of the silver screen? He might just be ready to take the plunge.
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