IT REALLY IS a dark and stormy night. The winter's first blizzard has blown into New York, shutting the airports and emptying the avenues. Inside the Museum of Modern Art, Oliver Stone stares grimly out a sixth-floor window, while downstairs, in one of the museum's theaters, an advance screening of his new film, Nixon, is unspooling before a less-than-packed VIP audience.

''This is going to spoil my premiere tomorrow,'' Stone groans, as golf-ball-size snowflakes splat against the window. ''I can't imagine opening on a worse day. Who's going to go to my movie?''

An excellent question -- whatever the weather. Three hours and ten minutes of middle-aged white guys sitting around in suits, Nixon is one of the most unabashedly uncommercial holiday movies ever released by a major studio. At a hefty 148 pages, its script is so densely packed with dialogue it makes King Lear look like a Schwarzenegger vehicle. And while its cast is chockful of Serious Thespians -- James Woods, Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, Paul Sorvino, Powers Boothe, E.G. Marshall -- none of them are what you might call Tom Cruise-class megastars. Granted, the Welshman who plays the 37th President once did a terrific demented cannibal -- which isn't too much of a stretch from a politician -- but even he isn't the most marketable actor in the world. Put it this way: His face isn't going to end up on the box of a McDonald's Happy Meal anytime soon.

''It doesn't look very appetizing on paper, I agree,'' says the Oscar-winning director. ''There's not much action in the conventional sense.... But the character is just so fascinating. He's this contradiction of idealism and corruption. He wanted to be a great statesman. He saw greatness and understood the meaning of it. But the weapons that allowed him to rise to the top were also the weapons that destroyed him. Anger and paranoia. Revenge and deception. Deviousness and lying. So he failed. He failed in a big way. And had a major public humiliation.''

Stone glances out the window at the swirling storm. What was that he was saying about public humiliation?

TWENTY-FIVE hundred miles away, Anthony Hopkins is sunning himself on a patio at the Miramar Sheraton Hotel in Santa Monica, Calif. With his head completely shaved for his next role -- he'll be playing the unsquarest Cubist of them all in Merchant Ivory's Surviving Picasso -- he looks more like Colonel Klink than Dick Nixon, but no matter. After a string of critically acclaimed performances -- in Howards End, The Remains of the Day, and, of course, his scenery-chewing turn as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs -- you'd think Nixon would be just the sort of dish he'd be hungry for. Not so.

''I knew when I took on Nixon that I was going to be way out of my depth,'' he says, lighting up a cigar. ''I'd been playing all these uptight English gentlemen. I wasn't sure I could get the vocal aspect of it. I was dubious. I kept asking Oliver if he was sure he wanted me.''

You Might Also Like

• Movie Review NIXON (Dec 20, 1995) | Owen Gleiberman
• Video Review Nixon | Steve Daly
• Ask the DVD Critic Who gets your vote as the best 'president' on DVD? | Ken Tucker
• Movie News GETTING HER PAT DOWN (Dec 20, 1995) | Steve Daly
• News empty shell
• Movie News Can Anthony Hopkins top Beau Bridges? (Dec 20, 1995) | Anne Thompson