The truths that each of the best-picture nominees left on the cutting-room floor:

‘CAPOTE” portrays an artist making deep moral compromises in pursuit of his masterpiece. Truman Capote is shown befriending, then betraying Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, the murderers at the heart of “In Cold Blood.”

Capote offers them legal help, the better to stave off their execution so he can extract a full confession from Smith. Once he has it he cuts off contact, the better to hasten the execution that he needs to finish his book. The historical record, however -- including Gerald Clarke’s biography, on which the film is based -- tells a rather different story.

Capote, as is made clear in one of his letters, had obtained a “private” confession from Smith by the middle of 1960 -- shortly after the men’s arrest and trial and a full five years before they went to the gallows. There was never any question of manipulating the legal process. As the men’s court-appointed attorney told George Plimpton, one of Capote’s biographers, it is doubtful anyone could have saved them from execution following their confession to police and entirely orderly trial. Capote never cut off contact with the killers but rather went to extraordinary lengths, including bribery, to circumvent the rules of Kansas’ death row so he could visit and write to them from June 1963 until their deaths.

It is true that Capote lied to Smith and Hickock about how much of his book he had written, tried to conceal the title from them so they wouldn’t think he was accusing them of premeditated murder -- the biggest legal question in the appeals process -- and told his friends at the end that he couldn’t wait to see them hang. On the day of their deaths, he ignored their entreaties to be with them, cabling them that he was not permitted to, which was not true. He ended up saying the briefest of goodbyes before watching their appointment with the “Big Swing.”

These could certainly be regarded as betrayals. But the biggest of those depicted in the film never happened. And yet the movie wants you to believe that these embellishments and inventions were responsible for Capote’s descent into drinking and drugs, his failure to ever complete another book.

Of course, “Capote” is a feature film, not a documentary. But there’s a difference between changing little things -- having Capote use a typewriter, for example, when he typically wrote in longhand -- and changing motives and behavior to cast a person in a substantially more negative light.

The distortions matter too, because “Capote” is a film about the spiritual and moral consequences of playing with the truth and with other people’s lives. “Capote” looks at the question through the prism of an artist searching for glory. It is worth asking if the filmmakers haven’t done a little artistic overreaching of their own.