When did the "classic period" end?

1967 is widely regarded as the ushering in of a new age in Hollywood films (and for good reason).  After '67, "traditional" Hollywood movies, even when excellent, might seem a bit retrograde.
Interesting article:
www.newwavefilm.com/international/new-hollywood.shtml

After WWII. Then began the more gritty Modern Period, until c.1964-65, when Postmodernism took over - and we have been stuck with it ever since...

It's probably a question that can't really be answered. Or at the very least, one that will get nearly as many answers as there are people to ask. 

Perhaps one would have to begin by defining the "classic period" in the first place. Is it merely a matter of calendar year(s)? When something like a presidential term, or a war or a marriage or a job or even a life comes to an end, there's a definite date, and you can say, "Yup, that's when it ended."

In the case of the era of classic films, I suspect there's overlap: it was winding down while whatever took its place - call it "the new Hollywood" or what have you - was burgeoning. In 1969, for instance, you had pictures like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider and Alice's Restaurant, as representative as any of "the new Hollywood," in release right alongside ones like Anne Of the Thousand Days, Hello Dolly and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, themselves certainly representing vestiges of the classic era. And while directors like Scorcese, Cassavetes and Altman were finding their strides, producers of classics such as Hal Wallis, Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner, along with directors like Wyler, Hitchcock and Mankiewicz, were working into the '70s or, in the cases of Wilder and Cukor, into the '80s.

I suppose much depends upon one's point of view. I'm willing to guess there were major film figures in 1930 who considered that their classic period had already ended. There's a story about Douglas Fairbanks walking over to a newly-built soundstage with a friend and, gazing into the dark emptiness of the cavernous space, lamenting, "The romance of picture making ends here." 

There were those who felt a classic era had ended with the gradual collapse of the studio system in the '50s. In his autobiography, Frank Capra complained that, by the end of that decade, producers and directors were no longer dealing with actors like Frank Sinatra, John Wayne or Glenn ford as employees, but as corporations, with everything down to the smallest script changes being negotiated through their individual production companies.

I'm generally okay with a loose interpretation of the classic period winding down sometime from the mid-60s to the early 70s, while the next era was taking off. And that era has certainly produced its own share of now-classics: The Wild Bunch, Cabaret, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Network and so on. What do we call those: new classics? Sounds kind of funny when talking about films over 40-50 years old. I bet we can agree on this much: whatever we call that period, it's been over since the end of the 80s, when corporations, accountants, marketers and focus groups began determining what got green-lit or didn't.

Or maybe not. I'm easy.               

Agree difficult to pick one moment... and yes - as much as"New Hollywood" fare had hits with authority baiting,wifeswapping, grass smoking, draft dodging leads  etc an old school squaresville Big studio flic like AIRPORT could do as good business as any of the titles I mentioned in my first post.. if not better.

There's lots of overlap to be sure.  But there was definitely a sense in 1967 that the death knell for "classic" Hollywood filmmaking had sounded.  A telling indicator was the poster ad for 1967's Rough Night In Jericho, which read, "Who said they don't make Westerns like they used to?  We just did."
www.imdb.com/title/tt0062218/mediaviewer/rm1416311552/

Give or take a few years, there seems a remarkably close consensus among posters and the critics as to when the classic era ended.

In which case, why do half the posts on this so-called Classic board discuss movies made since then?

Personally, I view 1970 as the cutoff year. I was born that year and anything before I came along I consider to be classic and anything after is modern...although some of those 70's movies are looking less and less modern and more classic with each passing year.