Domestic distributors will have a wide variety of choices at Cannes this year, from completed films in competition, to packages that have begun production or are only at the script stage with loose commitments from filmmakers and stars. Most of the buyers I spoke to claim they are in no rush to bid up the joint, but the pace of buying usually depends on several variables.

MR. PIP –Director, Andrew Adamson. Cast, Hugh Laurie, Kerry Fox. In the Papua New Guinea province of Bougainville during an ongoing war between soldiers and rebels over copper mining, a young girl becomes transfixed by the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations when it is read at school by the only white man in the village.

Everyone’s favorite misanthropic, pill-popping physician has hung up his stethoscope. Hugh Laurie’s long-running Fox hit drama House finished after its eighth season in April 2012. The Cambridge-educated Brit, one of TV’s best-paid actors through the show’s finale, is now free to focus on his second love: music. His 2011 album Let Them Talk topped the Billboard blues charts for the year.

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After eight seasons and 177 episodes, House ends with an outbreak of poignant goodbyes. In the emotional run-up to the series finale — the episode, titled “Everybody Dies,” airs May 21 at 9pm on Fox — each shooting day brought cheers, standing Os and misty-eyed send-offs. “A succession of daily memorial services, it was,” as Hugh Laurie puts it. “Someone would yell, ‘Hey, everybody, this is Omar Epps’ last scene!’ ‘This is Jesse Spencer’s last scene!’ ‘This is B camera operator’s last scene.’ The art director’s. The sound technician’s. It became hard to process all the finality.”

It’s amusing to imagine Dr. Gregory House himself in a situation like that. TV’s greatest medical grump was never a group-hug kinda guy, and it’s hard to picture House sweetly switching off the lights at Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital the way, say, Sam Malone did at the end of Cheers. Then again, TV has never known a character quite like House — charming yet sadistic, brilliant yet impossible and somehow a sex symbol even with the limp, the unshaven mug and the pockets full of Vicodin.

Laurie was an equally unlikely prime-time star. When he landed the role in 2004, he was a 45-year-old British actor known mostly for BBC sketch comedies and playing the dad in the Stuart Little children’s movies. “I was perfectly content being a gypsy actor, or at least I thought I was,” Laurie says. He soon found greater meaning barking out medical advice and insults with pitch-perfect American snark. (Colleague to House: “You’re late.” House to colleague. “You’re fat.”)

Ever the English gent behind the scenes, Laurie leaves the series like a rock star and, in fact, is spending his summer playing piano on tour with Copper Bottom, the actor’s acclaimed blues and jazz band (he has no definite plans beyond that). TV Guide Magazine reported Laurie’s final-season salary as $700,000 per episode, and he’s been generously dispensing thank-you gifts, including replica House canes for everyone on the cast and crew. On the last day of filming, Laurie chartered a private jet — “like the one Led Zeppelin used,” he laughs — and flew the production to an undisclosed location 26 minutes outside L.A. for the final shoot. “The flight attendant gave me control of the microphone so I could bid everyone farewell,” Laurie says. “Then, frankly, there was more man-hugging than you want to know about.”

What fans most want to know about is how House will end.  “We want a concluding episode that feels like a summation in some sense, something that takes an overview,” says David Shore, who created House in the image of his own lovably cranky self. “The ending is very personal to me, but it’s tough to make a good series finale. They’ve failed more than they’ve succeeded. I hope people are satisfied, but the show has to end either way.”

The truth is, it’s ending right on time. House‘s ratings, which peaked in Season 3, have been on a slow, quiet slide (the show finished in 42nd place last season). Plus, only so many more patients can develop mysterious nosebleeds as House’s medical team frets over chickpea allergies or possible Lupus (why is it always possible Lupus?). As Epps, who played Dr. Eric Foreman for eight seasons, says, “I’ve been thrown up on so many times I can’t remember. I’ve seen all kinds of organs explode, all kinds of human ooze coming out of who knows where. Now if I’m out in a restaurant and someone goes, ‘Is there a doctor here?’ I basically try to hide.” That’s not always easy. Peter Jacobson, who’s played Dr. Chris Taub since Season 4, says, “There was a guy at an airport recently who asked me to look at his wife’s arm to diagnose something. People often joke, but I realized he was dead serious.”

Who wouldn’t want doctors like them, and especially like House, a no-B.S. diagnostician who solves every medical riddle in 43 minutes? Even Laurie worships the guy. “I spend my entire life apologizing, and House never does,” he says. “It’s been incredibly liberating playing him. He can be horrible, he can be jagged and awkward, but the character has a confidence in his abilities and opinions, and sometimes that’s all you need.”

Shore still remembers dreaming up House. “I wanted an anti-Marcus Welby,” he says. “A guy who calls idiots idiots to their faces, and with a bit of Sherlock Holmes thrown in.” Along the way were challenges, like maintaining the show’s high standards. “That’s what kept us honest,” Shore says. “It never got easy. Putting House in an institution. That was difficult. Putting him in a relationship. Whoa! Throwing his entire original team out. That was dumb commercially, but it felt like an opportunity. We kept creating situations that asked, ‘How is House going to react?’” 

What’s funny is how little House changed over the years. “You look at the pilot episode and it’s all right there,” says Robert Sean Leonard, whose Dr. James Wilson is the only true friend House ever had. “House wasn’t delighting people in the beginning, and he’s not doing it in the end. It’s a weird formula for success, but we ended up liking House because House didn’t need to be liked by anyone.”

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Stephen Fry gave a few more hints of his project with Hugh on Twitter today:

M’coll Hugh & I will be working together to voice the new animated feature of Oscar Wilde’s THE CANTERVILLE GHOST

Stephen Fry has announced that he is working again with former comedy partner Hugh Laurie.

The pair, best known for their BBC sketch show A Bit of Fry & Laurie, will reunite for a “project” in the near future.

The QI host tweeted today: “M’coll Hugh Laurie and I are cooking up a project together.

“We will be working again soon. Sorry to be mysterious but more news when I can.”

The duo also starred alongside each other in sitcom Jeeves and Wooster between 1990 and 1993.

Their critically-acclaimed sketch show A Bit of Fry & Laurie ran for four series between 1989 and 1995.

Fry and Laurie reunited in 2010 for a GOLD retrospective, celebrating 30 years of their TV partnership.

Laurie, who is currently the highest-paid actor on US television, recently shot the final season of his hit Fox medical drama House.

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Thanks for the transcript, House_Wilson LJ!

With Fox’s acclaimed drama checking out for good on May 21, House star Hugh Laurie looks back on eight great years of medical mysteries and, yes, madness.

ON OUR LAST DAY OF SHOOTING, Fox’s top brass gave me some top brass. I’m not talking about my salary, which was undeniably mad — the sort of money that should only be paid to people who destroy Earth-bound asteroids, or invent a method for converting journalists into clean energy — no, I mean they gave me a trumpet. And not just any trumpet, but a vintage Selmer, as played by Louis Armstrong. (The certificate of provenance that came with it doesn’t specify whether Pops played this actual instrument or a close relation, but I suppose the lack of clarity is clarity of a sort. Never mind. It is a wondrous gift.) I tried blowing it immediately, almost turning my digestive tract inside out in the process, but I did get a sound. I tooted my own horn and it felt good. 
Now I know that I’m not supposed to do this. It is the accepted custom, especially among my countrymen, to play down one’s accomplishments; to blush, and stammer charmingly about luck, and teamwork, and possibly the hand of God (which, when you think about it, is a ferociously arrogant explanation for one’s success, but we’ll leave t hat for now). But this Dance of Modesty can often be disingenuous. It serves to deflect and disarm, to spike the guns of one’s enemies; I know because I have used it that way myself. 
So, for the length of this paragraph alone, I am striking out against the custom. I am going to toot my horn loud and clear and say that, for eight years, I worked as hard as I knew how, to make House as good as it could be. I frothed and fretted over every detail, every line, every moment. Driving home in the small hours, I pounded the steering wheel as I replayed mistakes in my mind. I tossed and turned every night, plotting the next day’s maneuvers, until I reached moments of near-madness — some would say nearer than near — because I loved House with all my heart, and loved the other characters and the world in which they moved just as much. 
At its best, the show felt to me like the sweetest kind of chamber music, with perfectly satisfying intervals, cadences, rhythms; but to achieve that consonance, every part of the ensemble had to be just so. The modern style of acting produces a rough, igneous stone from which skilled editors are expected to cut and polish fine diamonds, but that could never have worked for House. The door to Wilson’s office had to close between the words “malignant” and “melanoma,” to punctuate the moment, not a half second earlier or later. The cap of the pin bottle had to snap shut just before the patient turns his head from the window, or the moment would fail. A misplaced blink, or swallow, or crack of the voice, and a phrase could be reduced to a men string of words: serviceable, comprehensible, but not musical. Often we hit clam, a bum note that would ring on through the following scenes, distracting, and weakening the effect. But we hit some very sweet ones, too. 
Of course, critics and Internet wags liked to say that the show, in its middle years, became formulaic. They had fun reducing an episode to its basic elements: Patient gets sick, team tries variety of madcap diagnoses eventually settling on the most improbable, hey presto, patient cured. 
Well, yes, one can apply that technique to pretty much any human endeavor: All blues songs are the same, all operas are the same, all games of basketball are definitely the same (to an English eye anyway); in fact everything is the same, including critics, if you don’t pay attention to their differences And if you preface your critique with the word “just,” you can diminish and undermine the most complex structures. The Mona Lisa is “just” oil paint on wood, arranged to look like a woman. String Theory is “just” an effort to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. King Lear is “just” the story of an old man going loopy. 
Obviously, I’m not claiming that House rose to the level of Shakespeare—that really would be loopy—but it did have nuance. Or tried to. 
And that, to me, is the most important thing: House tried to be about something. Most procedural dramas set out merely to comfort the audience with the idea that we live in an ordered, moral universe in which virtue is rewarded and sin is punished; wherever evil takes to the streets, a group of heavily-armed models will be there to chase it, catch it, and expunge it from our nightmares. This is not an entirely accurate representation of the facts. 
But House, I believe, grappled with some chewy questions. Is it worth using bad means for good ends? Can an action be good if its motive is bad? Or if its motive is not intentionally good? What is a soul? Is there a God? If there isn’t, what defines a friend, and what will you do for him? We didn’t always express these questions well, by any means, but we tried, and a large number of people around the world seemed to respond to the effort. I am so damn proud of that. 
But now, finally, the undertakers are in. In the last week of shooting we could hear the Pac-Men at our heels, chain-sawing through the sets we’ve trodden for eight years. Even the sets themselves seemed to know that the jig was up: Windows started sticking, door handles fell off, carpets curled up like dried leaves. Now the place is awash with cardboard boxes, and the writers have descended on House’s office like a crowd of post-Saddam looters. I know this because I tried to do the same, but got there too late. I had thought of putting in a bid for the glass door, with House’s name and title painted on it, thinking it would make a good shower door—and then I realized it wouldn’t. 
But enough with the looting, and more than enough with my tooting. There were so many great horns in the brass section, far more than I can mention here: Robert Sean Leonard can take anyone, anywhere, in any movie, TV show, play, musical, piece of modem dance, anything; David Shore is a truly great writer; Katie Jacobs may be the best producer in the business; Gale Tattersall may be the best cinematographer, Tony Gaudioz the best operator, Jeremy Cassells the best production designer, and on and on and on. So much hard work, and love, and pride, and companionship – it fair mists the eye to think how far we have come since those first faltering steps in Vancouver in 2004. 
No one knows where network TV is headed. Cable is all around us, with its many advantages for viewer and producer alike. (You can’t guess at how much we envied the stretchiness of cable when it comes to running time — if they need another 30 seconds, or a couple of minutes, to tell their story, then so be it — while we skinned our knuckles every week against the network schedule. We often had to choose between the set-up and the punchline, and wept for both.) But wherever it’s going, it might not take a future House with it. It’s possible that we may have experienced the beginning of the End of Days for network drama. Before long you will be faced only with reality shows, broadcast on your wristwatch, or your loved one’s teeth, or simply inside your head. There will be no great commonality with whom you can discuss and share the pleasure of drama, or its cost. This may very well be it. Apres nous le deluge. Or I could be talking out of my hat. 
The Loopy Old Man writer also came up with The Seven Ages of Man (and if we had had our wits about us, perhaps we might have finished House a year ago, allowing our seven seasons to fit his lifespan more snugly), the last of which, according to the sorrowful Jaques, goes like this: 
Last scene of all/That ends this strange eventful history/Is second childishness and mere oblivion/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. 
Toot toot.

Hugh’s concerts in Spain:

Barcelona (July 26th, 21 pm – Teatre Arteria Paral·lel)

Madrid (July 27th, 21 pm – Teatro Circo Circe)

Marbella (Starlite Festival, July 29th, 21:45 pm – Auditorio de Marbella/LaCantera)