By KATHERINE ROSMAN

From Grumpy Cat to Keyboard Cat, when online fur balls are prepared for primary time they spin to Internet talent-manager Ben Lashes to measure commercials and chartering deals. WSJ’s Linda Freund reports.

Some celebrities simply can't be pleased. Just ask Ben Lashes, a talent manager in Los Angeles. This week, he landed a vital motion-picture understanding for a customer who 9 months ago was an different vital in Morristown, Ariz., race 227.

When he told his customer that she was streamer to Hollywood, she looked bored. “She hates movies,” says Mr. Lashes of his client, Grumpy Cat, a cat with a mouth puckered into a scowl whose viral photos have ricocheted around a Internet.

Helping Cats Turn Internet Fame Into Dollars

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Grumpycats.com

Tardar Sauce, a churned multiply cat from Arizona who has gained luminary as ‘Grumpy Cat.’

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Mr. Lashes, 34 years old, is an deputy for Internet cats. When an mocking sketch of a sly becomes Internet famous, Mr. Lashes contacts a pet owners and offers to assistance strategize ways to prolong, strengthen and monetize. He says he operates with this doubt in mind: “What would Walt Disney

do if he combined Mickey Mouse and it went viral on YouTube?”

Grumpy Cat, a Arizona sourpuss, is Mr. Lashes’s star client. The cat is carrying a mini-Mickey moment.

Last September, Bryan Bundesen, 34, a wire technician from Galion, Ohio, was visiting his sister Tabatha in Arizona. He snapped a print of her cat, a churned multiply whose genuine name is Tardar Sauce. (Ms. Bundesen, who works as a waitress during a Red Lobster, says her daughter suspicion a cat’s fur was a tone of tartar sauce, though misspelled it.) Mr. Bundesen posted a design on a website Reddit. People suspicion it was funny. Many began to conceal a print with sentences expressing what they illusory to be a cat’s exasperation with humans: “I suspicion we could not be some-more disappointed…you valid me wrong,” reads one of thousands. “There are dual kinds of people in this world…and we don’t like them,” says another.

Within weeks, photos and videos of a cat had been common and posted to social-media sites millions of times.

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Grumpy Cat

Mr. Lashes became a cat’s deputy in October. He says he is perplexing to assistance a Bundesens gain on a cat’s luminary though overexposing it. This week, Mr. Lashes helped negotiate a sale of a film choice formed on Grumpy Cat’s persona to Broken Road Productions, a prolongation association obliged for Adam Sandler’s 2011 automobile “Jack and Jill.” Terms of a one-picture understanding weren’t disclosed.

This week, Grumpy Cat is entrance to New York to foster a stirring Chronicle Books release, “Grumpy Cat: A Grumpy Book: Disgruntled Tips and Activities Designed to Put a Frown on Your Face” during BookExpo America, a book attention convention.

Mr. Lashes also has fake a understanding with Grenade Beverage LLC to emanate and discharge a line of Grumpy Cat coffee-in-cans and bottled beverages. Excluding a film deal, a Bundesens have warranted a low-six-figure sum off a cat so far, Mr. Bundesen says. Mr. Lashes’s take is about 20%, clients say. (Mr. Lashes declined to criticism on financial arrangements.)

“He is unequivocally good during assisting us not get taken advantage of,” Mr. Bundesen says of Mr. Lashes.

Mr. Lashes grew adult in Spokane, Wash. After a year of college, he forsaken out in 2000 to pursue his dream of apropos a veteran musician. He fronted a rope and worked in talent scouting for an eccentric label.

In 2010, he listened from Charlie Schmidt, an aged crony of his father’s and a multimedia artist in Spokane. Back in 1985, Mr. Schmidt told Mr. Lashes, he had dressed his now defunct cat, Fatso, in a blue T-shirt, sat him during a keyboard and manipulated a cat such that it played a strain Mr. Schmidt wrote. Mr. Schmidt had recently posted a aged video on YouTube. Keyboard Cat was floating up.

Mr. Lashes started assisting his family friend, formulating a social-media plan to fan a cat’s grass-roots popularity. He told Mr. Schmidt to adopt a new cat and make some-more videos. Then came a chartering deals with T-shirt, fondle and newness present companies. Soon, Mr. Lashes was creation deals for a cat to seem in selling and ad campaigns. In all, Mr. Schmidt says he has done scarcely $300,000 from Keyboard Cat deals Mr. Lashes has arranged.

Mr. Lashes now lives in West Hollywood, Calif., where he works out of his one-bedroom condo. His newest customer is Princess Monster Truck, a cat with an underbite. “When it comes to cats, Ben knows who is going to be big,” says Christopher Torres, a customer of Mr. Lashes and a creator of Nyan Cat, a digital, square-shaped feline. Mr. Lashes also represents other photographs, images, sayings or ideas that widespread online and turn informative inside jokes.

Mr. Lashes says he tries to assistance his clients strengthen their brands as well.

Last month, Messrs. Torres and Schmidt filed a lawsuit with a U.S. District Court in a executive district of California. They lay that 5th Cell and Warner Bros.—respectively a developer and publisher of a Scribblenauts authorization of videogames—have infringed on a copyright and heading right of Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat, by including a characters in Scribblenauts games.

“If you’re a large house and we routinely compensate for a use of these things, we will come after you,” says Kia Kamran, an profession who works with Mr. Lashes on his clients’ transaction matters and who also represents a egghead skill rights of a tattoo on former fighter Mike Tyson’s face.

A mouthpiece for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment declined to comment. 5th Cell didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Lashes says he is driven by a enterprise to “protect a small guy” though also to have fun. At a South by Southwest tech gathering in Austin, Texas, in March, he organised a paid-appearance understanding for Grumpy Cat from a website Mashable. For two-hour stretches over 3 days, a cat lay on a cushioned pedestal in Mashable’s tent and conventioneers waited in line for hours to have their print taken with a nonplused puss.

The logistics weren’t that difficult to work through—Grumpy Cat was already scheduled to be in Austin to fasten a luminary book of an online diversion show, “Will Kitty Play With It?”

As partial of a transport losses lonesome by Friskies, a cat-food code that sponsors a diversion show, Mr. Bundesen says he chauffeured Grumpy Cat around Austin in a black BMW

X5, with coloured windows. When they left a final day of a Mashable appearance, he says a automobile was swamped by 40 to 50 people holding photos of a cat by a automobile windows. “It was like a paparazzi,” he says.

A chronicle of this essay seemed May 29, 2013, on page A1 in a U.S. book of The Wall Street Journal, with a headline: A Hollywood Agent Helps Web’s Cats Claw Their Way to a Top.