Have you done any pruning on this rose before? Do you know what type of rose it is? Pictures would definitely help.

I have only pruned out old dead shoots. Sorry for the pic quality. My wife sent it to me as too small of a pic and the resizing makes it blurry but you get the point. It is between 5 and 7 feet tall depending and the shoot/branch and obviously very top heavy. I currently leans several feet out into the yard and has been run into several times (ouch!).

If I prune this back to 3 to 4 feet and only the strongest shoots, will it generate new buds below my prune line?

Seems that almost all new growth is currently in the 4 to 6 foot range. There is no new growth for the first couple of feet.

What do I do with this bush? Thanks.

Cut everything down to hip high. It'll come back with a lot of new growth and blooms and should fill out to make a nice shrub that has foliage from top to bottom. Give it a LITTLE (hand full scattered around the bush) fertilizer, water it in and watch what happens.

It could be a climber and those naturally tend to have that growth pattern. They drop their bottom leaves in order to send food to the top where the blooms are. The other reason it it could be growing so tall and lanky is because it's trying to get light. Roses need 6 to 8 hours of sunlight a day to grow and bloom properly. You can try and prune it back but it may not grow anything new from those bare canes. It's hard to say. Severely pruning it like that could kill it.