The power that Drew Barrymore accumulated through Flower Films was qualitatively different from the fame she had experienced as a child star. As a child, she had been valuable to the industry and had very little control over how that value was deployed or how she was treated within the systems that deployed it. As an adult producer, she had significant influence over what projects got made, who was hired, how films were developed and released. The person who had grown up without reliable control over her own circumstances had built, through sustained effort and clear strategic thinking, an operation that gave her substantial control over her professional life.
50 First Dates (2004), a romantic comedy opposite Sandler in which she played a woman with a memory condition that prevents her from forming new long-term memories, performed well enough — approximately $196 million worldwide — to confirm that the Barrymore-Sandler pairing had genuine audience appeal. Grey Gardens (2009), the HBO biographical film in which she played Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, earned her a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as an Emmy nomination, and demonstrated to audiences and critics who might have thought they had her categorized that her range was considerably wider than her commercial films suggested.
She also directed. Whip It (2009) was her directorial debut, a film about women’s roller derby that she has described as one of the projects she is most proud of — not because of its commercial performance, which was modest, but because of what it represented in terms of creative vision and execution.