She passes the network starmakers behind "Big Women: Big Love" and "Sex Sent Me to the ER," feeling like she might faint. She is wrapped in an old black dress she pulled on at her parents' house in Arlington, Virginia, after about three hours of sleep.
To get here, Gamse paid $2,000 for entry to the Realscreen Summit, an annual confab of "nonfiction" TV industry insiders in late January in Washington, home turf of the National Geographic Channel, PBS and Discovery Communications.
She had spent several years working as a freelance documentarian on an award-winning South African art film that few people saw. Now at 30, she is determined to make something people can't look away from. In America, that's reality TV.
One way for her to break into the unscripted universe is to win the Summit Showdown, where she and three other filmmakers get to pitch ideas for a nonfiction series to a panel of high-powered network executives. The judges choose which one has the best chance at being greenlit.
From the other side of the stage, Jack Osbourne, reality star of "The Osbournes" and "Extreme Celebrity Detox," calls out over the loudspeakers: "You have five minutes to pitch your project. And you will be cut off."
Gamse, long-haired and willowy, with starry eyes and a relaxed smile, plays her "sizzle reel." The teaser footage is quick-cut with talk of violence and absolution by her would-be reality TV stars: ex-convicts crafting new lives after years behind bars. She devoted months to following them, seeing how they work, how they seek forgiveness. She calls the show "Hustlers' Den."
"This could be," she says, her voice wavering, "one man's last chance at societal redemption."
She glances over at the arbiters of the reality-industrial complex. Some look curious; others look bored. There is not much they have not seen before. Of the 1,715 series that aired in prime time last year, 79 percent were unscripted shows, according to industry figures.
And yet, viewers' tastes are as inscrutable as ever: Shows molded after old blockbusters bomb in the ratings. Surprises such as "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" become stardom machines.
Americans' once-captive TV audience is also increasingly distracted by YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Ratings are falling, sending producers back out to mine the beautiful diversity of mankind for some fresh slice of reality to puppeteer.
Gamse thinks she can offer something different and more authentic, important ideas hidden in what she called the "Trojan horse" of mass-market entertainment.
But standing there under the blinding lights, at the altar of reality TV, she couldn't help but wonder: Would anyone want the kind she has to sell?
In early 2009, Gamse, fresh out of college and armed with a Fulbright scholarship, flew to South Africa to shoot "The Creators," her feature-length documentary about post-apartheid art.
Life far from home was brutal. Thieves stole her clothes, her underwear, the tires off her car and nearly a year of footage. Ten months in, her funding ran out, forcing her to scrounge for odd jobs around Cape Town.
After three years, Gamse flew home with tendinitis and tinnitus from arduous editing sessions, and recurring tick-bite fever from a walk through the woods with a traditional South African sangoma healer in search of treatment for her other ailments.
But the harshest insult, she says, came later, in the form of fruitless meetings with distributors, who told her that her characters were "too ethnic."
"I made the thing I thought I should make. I took the creative process in a traditional, idealistic way," Gamse says. "I just happened to make a film that no one wanted."
She began to think "in a very calculating way" about what people want to watch. In other words, she started to think like a television producer.
So what do people want to watch?
In the late '90s, the answer was burly guys with big cameras, crusty from shooting nature documentaries. A decade later, "docusoaps" such as the "Real Housewives" empire were the hottest thing — until they weren't. Then, people wanted to laugh at Southerners, making "Duck Dynasty" a major hit — until that reality lost its novelty, too.
Within the industry, its most formulaic tent-pole programs had helped whisk it into a creative crisis, fueled by what a writer for British industry magazine Broadcast called "a conveyor belt of shows about auctioneers and hairy rednecks."
One of the few bright spots in the unscripted universe is true-crime TV, bolstered by the success of "Serial," a 12-part podcast exploring a 1999 murder in Baltimore and celebrated in Summit panels such as "Crime Pays ... And Plays." Laura Fleury, a programming head for Lifetime Movie Network, says viewers have "a strong desire for closure, justice, good guys winning, bad guys going to prison."
Comments like that give hope to Gamse, who worked on the idea for "Hustlers' Den" after meeting an ex-con named Fabian Ruiz. He spent 21 years in prison for killing the man who shot his brother. Upon his release, he started a company that takes inmates' Internet search requests and mails back the results.
Gamse was with Ruiz in New York while he was watching "Shark Tank," a reality show in which investors bet on or belittle a series of amateurs proposing mostly white-bread inventions. Ruiz had better stories than that, she recalls. He began talking about how ingenuity and finance worked in the grimy, unseen markets behind bars. She met with other ex-cons and filmed them as they told tales of opulent criminal holdings, jailhouse lessons and the quest for forgiveness once they got out. It was an underdog story, a tale of hope and redemption — perfect for a Trojan horse.
Inside the ballroom, Gamse's five minutes are almost over.
"Americans are fascinated with prison culture," she says in her best movie-trailer voice. "But what happens when these convicts are released and move in next door?"
She ends by saying she wasn't able to use the Kanye West/Jay-Z song "Diamonds From Sierra Leone" as music in her sizzle reel — she couldn't afford to pay for the rights — but she still thinks the words are pertinent, so she talk-raps them: "I sold kilos of coke, I'm guessin' I can sell CDs. I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man. Let me handle my business, damn!"
Time's up. She turns to face the judges.
One judge questions the show's originality. Paul Hardy, a Lifetime executive, says viewers may not empathize with convicted criminals.
"We all agree people deserve second chances," he says. "But in TV terms, that is going to be a battle."
Gamse walks off the stage, exhausted. She takes a seat in the audience as a veteran filmmaker pitches a show about archaeologists unraveling ancient killings.
Next is a duo selling what they describe as "House of Cards" meets "Survivor," in which contestants compete for a mock presidency through political-themed challenges, such as leading town-hall meetings and creating attack ads. "You're competing with the real world," Hardy says, "and you're making a slightly lesser version of it."
The last pitch is for a French filmmaker's climate-change-focused series featuring economist and best-selling author Jeffrey Sachs as he prepares for a United Nations summit in Paris. It is the kind of show, the filmmaker says later, that French audiences would swoon over.
The American judges, however, are unmoved.
"You have the class here," says National Geographic Channel executive Alan Eyres. "What you're missing is the sex."
The judges take a few minutes to decide which version of reality they like best. When they're done, Jack Osbourne calls for a drumroll.
"And the winner is," he says, " 'Hustlers' Den'!"
Gamse sits up in her chair, her tired eyes open wide. She climbs back onstage to accept a big ceremonial check, not for money, but for a music-production package from a studio. She also gets a free pass to next year's Summit. Winning does not guarantee her series will get approved, but it does land her a meeting with executives who now know her name.
Offstage, she looks dazzled and a bit giddy. Producers swarm her, congratulating her and offering her jobs. Agents ask for meetings. A woman says Gamse's sizzle reel made her eyes tear up.
Gamse goes upstairs to one of the Summit parties and forces herself to schmooze some more. The whole time, she keeps her giant check by her side so that people will notice. When she is too tired to keep smiling, she puts on her coat and goes outside to find her parents, who are waiting to drive her home.
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