Hotel for Dogs (film) their personality." Freudenthal said that he deliberately chose both very small and very large dogs to create a contrast similar to the characters of Lenny and George in the John Steinbeck novella "Of Mice And Men". The majority of the dogs cast were rescues. The lead dog, who plays Friday, was rescued about six months before shooting began. Crew members also helped to find adoptive homes for the abandoned dogs and several adopted dogs themselves. A Hollywood animal trainer, Mark Forbes, was hired to prepare the dogs before shooting began. Forbes and his team began working with the dogs about
John Steinbeck notes, "[T]his honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was precisely because the committee made its judgment ... on its own criteria, rather than plugging into 'the main currents of American writing' as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had value." In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said: In 2012, (50 years later), the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and